The Critical Mom's Guide to Gun Control

 (1) President Obama should follow the example of Australia.  After a gunman killed 35 tourists and wounded 23 more at a seaside resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania on April 28, 1996, a newly elected conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, moved rapidly and decisively to ban semi-automatic weapons and to create a weapons buyback program. 

(2) Put an emergency moratorium on semiautomatic sales.  Gun sales, in the wake of the Newtown catastrophe, are skyrocketing, the way they have after every single mass killing in the US.  President Obama, we look to you to stop this.

(3) President Obama, please:  disarm the NRA.  It is a national disgrace, worse than the Ku Klux Klan.  

(4) President Obama, LEAD us--Lead like FDR on steroids, never taking no for an answer, fearing nothing but fear itself, and finding a way for ordinary Americans to significantly impede the manufacture and sale of semiautomatic weapons.

(5) Today is January 31:  I wrote this post back in mid-December, and can't bear to think how many gun incidents and near-misses we have endured since then, as of today, the shootings in Atlanta, Georgia.  The head of the NRA is marketing guns to kids, pretending assault-style weapons are nothing worse than BB guns, which are bad enough.

(6) Which puts me in repeat-fire mode: President Obama, you have to be stronger, you have to be more forceful, you have to find a grass-roots way to disable the NRA.