For Lane a real tragedy, for three others a horrific act

Sometimes parents really are clueless.

I don't want to blame Jennifer Luna of Duncan, Okla., for the fact that her son Chancey Allen Luna reportedly shot and killed a college baseball player from Australia because they were bored, but I'm sure not going to buy her statement that "I know my son. He is a good kid."

Christopher Lane

The only "good kid" in this story was Christopher Lane, 22, who came all the way from Melbourne for a baseball scholarship at East Central University in Ada, Okla.

Chancey Luna, he might be a monster.

He and his buddies were apparently riding around Duncan. Luna was playing with a gun in the back seat when he apparently decided at random to shoot somebody. Lane was walking on the sidewalk and Luna apparently leaned out the window and shot him in the back.

He died.

But Jennifer Luna knows her son as a kid who likes to play basketball on a local court and who enjoys playing video games on his iPhone and Xbox.

Michael Dewayne Jones, the oldest of the three at 17, wept in the courtroom, but he was just the guy who drove the car. Duncan police chief Dan Ford said Jones told him earlier that they were bored and killed Duncan "just for the fun of it."

So he might be sort of a monster too.

It's a shame it's a black-white thing, because I'm sure there will be plenty of people who want to make a racial point about it.

I don't. I want to make a gun point, and I'll do it by asking the question whether this is why the goddamned National Rifle Association fights so hard to protect gun ownership, and whether the purpose of the Second Amendment is so kids can ride around in cars playing with guns.

Because they're killing our country.

I agree 100 percent with the former deputy prime minister of Australia, Tim Fischer, who criticized the NRA and suggested Australians should avoid the U.S.

"Tourists thinking of going to the USA should think twice," he said. "I am deeply angry about this because of the callous attitude of the three teenagers (but) it's a sign of the proliferation of guns on the ground in the USA. There is a gun for almost every American."

I've heard all the arguments and they don't work for me. The one that especially annoys me is when they say the Founding Fathers wanted people to have weapons to overthrow a tyrannical government. I have a hard time believing that the greatest minds of the 18th century wanted to make it easy to overthrow the government they were starting.

I don't have a single friend or relative who owns a gun, to the best of my knowledge. I think my grandfather had a shotgun in the late 1950s, when I was little, but the only thing he used it for was to put meat on the table.

I don't know how true the correlation is between gun ownership and small genitals, but it doesn't really matter. I do think there's a relationship between owning lots of guns and feelings of inferiority.

That's why Colt's famous gun that "won the west" was called the Great Equalizer.

It allowed little men to stand up to bigger ones.

And worthless ones to stand up to special ones.