Some are calling the NRA's silence on last weekend's Tucson massacre restraint or respect for the dead. But the NRA's silence after gun massacres is nothing new.
After Sulejman Talovic killed five in Salt Lake City's Trolley Square mall and Vincent J. Dortch killed three at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard within days of each other in February 2007, the NRA was also silent.
Like Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, Stephen Phillip Kazmierczak, the Northern Illinois University killer, Latina Williams, the Louisiana Technical College killer and Jennifer Sanmarco, the Goleta postal facility killer, Talovic and Dortch were legal gun owners.
Williams might have been living in her car, paranoid and delusional and giving her possessions away in suicidal gestures but she walked right into a New Orleans pawn shop and bought a .357 revolver and a box of ammunition the day before the shootings.
Sulejman Talovic may have been a Bossnian immigrant required to show a piece of second identification but bought the murder weapon at Sportsman's Fastcash, a pawn shop chain in Utah, with just one say investigators.
Other legal gun owners were Jiverly Voong, who killed 13 in Binghamton NY and was a frequent customer of Gander Mountain, and Richard Poplawski, who murdered three Pittsburgh police officers and bought his arsenal over the Web, according to his mother.
Other mass shooters who sailed through background checks were Terry Ratzmann, the Milwaukee church service killer, Chai Vang the Wisconsin hunter killer and Bart Ross, who killed a Chicago Federal judge's husband and mother.
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