If 3-4 per year are too many, why do we ignore that thousands of gang-related shootings that occur each year? That is not background noise, it is the bulk of h

If 3-4 per year are too many, why do we ignore that thousands of gang-related shootings that occur each year? That is not background noise, it is the bulk of homicide in this country and despite a recent reduction, we still see thousands of shootings each year (and tens of thousands of murders with other weapons). The real problem with the response to the Newtown shooting is not the call for gun control, but that the call focuses almost exclusively on guns that are rarely used in crime: rifles. The Newtown shooter had two handguns, and just a few days before the shooting, a handgun was used to murder a man, in broad daylight, on a New York City street. So on the one hand, you have the exceedingly rare case of a lunatic shooting children using a rifle, and on the other you have the exceedingly (and unfortunately) common case of a criminal shooting someone with a handgun. Which of these sounds like a more urgent issue to you? For what it's worth, handguns are a target for thieves. After a newspaper published a map of handgun owners in New York, there were at least three cases of houses being burglarized with a clear goal of stealing a handgun. Criminals buy handguns on the black market; they are not buying rifles on the black market, and even when they do buy rifles, they rarely use them because it is too hard to hide such a large weapon. Despite the media's mischaracterization of the Newtown shooter's rifle as a "high-power military-grade weapon," it is the less powerful cartridges like .22lr and 9mm Parabellum that are commonly used to kill. The panic over, "It looks scary and some lunatic killed people with it," is nothing but a distraction from the real problem we face in America. If we can only muster enough political strength to make stricter regulations on a single class of firearm, we should tighten the restrictions on the handguns, which people strangely find to be less "scary" (nevermind that it is deadly, right?) and bizarrely enough want to distance themselves from regulating (after all, by restricting guns, we don't want to restrict the right to defend one's home with force -- unless you are using a scary-looking gun to do it). Let's be reasonable about this: we have a real problem, and a not-so-real problem. Let's address the real problem first.