The National Gun Victim’s Action Council (NGAC) has announced a Starbucks boycott.

The only response to the two attacks in Norway yesterday is total horror. In the latest update, at least 91 people are dead from a bomb at a suite of government buildings and a gun attack at a Labour Party youth camp on Utoya Island. The suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, was a right-wing nationalist and Christian fundamentalist with a predilection for Pamela Geller and other anti-Muslim, white supremacist websites and writers.

Less remarked-upon is the kinds of systemic issues with public policy that led to the shooting in the first place: the breakdown of the US mental health system, and the ease with which people with intent to kill large numbers of people can get the weapons they need for that purpose. This has become the dog that didn’t bark in this tragedy. One of the victims of the shooting in Tucson was Gabe Zimmerman, a staffer for Giffords. His fiancee is one of the few to actually identify a problem related to the attack, and propose a solution.

I really hope this video of the shooting doesn’t get leaked, but just the retelling of it reinforces what Cheney leaned toward today. Jared Loughner, a determined individual, ran up and shot dozens of people at close range, and only ended his rampage when he had to reload, providing a moment of opportunity for the victims. Nobody had any chance of stopping him at any other point; the only heroic acts available to them were to shield other bystanders and sacrifice themselves. Loughner’s victims never knew what hit them. “More guns” in this case would have amounted to nothing; in fact, the one person with a gun who came running out to aid in the situation almost wound up shooting an innocent man.

Never one to publicly back down, America’s half-governor, Sarah Palin, quietly scrubbed her web presence of images of the now infamous “gun sight” ad. Team Sarah first tried to excuse the targets as “surveyor’s symbols,” but also deleted the ad from the website of SarahPAC. . . or so they thought.

One of the things that maybe surprised everyone after the assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords is the fact that the United States has not had a confirmed director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for four and a half years. Potential directors nominated by George Bush and Barack Obama alike, both of whom seemed to have the proper credentials for the job, were immediately opposed by the NRA. They objected to unbelievably minor transgressions on the part of the nominees, like revoking gun licenses of sellers who broke the law, and opposing giant .50 caliber bullets. And they were quickly able to find a US Senator to take up their cause and block confirmation.

The President will speak sometime during the “Together We Thrive” event happening at the McKale Center on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, four days after the assassination attempt that wounded 15 people, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), and killed 6 others, including a Giffords staffer, a federal judge and four constituents. It is expected that he will speak for 20 minutes and focus mainly on the victims themselves

I don’t really care that Boehner won’t support the King bill, which I find pretty ridiculous. But if legislation that comes from the Republican side can’t even get past the introductory stage, I don’t see what hope there is for Democratic bills.

It turned out that Zamudio actually pushed the holder of the gun into a wall, and thus came much closer to doing violence on an innocent man who had just taken the gun from Jared Loughner than even this description suggests. The potential for yet another innocent death was pretty high here. And a Wild West show with alternating bouts of gunfire seems like an extremely dangerous environment for bystanders.

Frank Lautenberg said it very clearly on MSNBC: the difference between this country and practically every other industrialized nation, which has a tiny fraction of the gun violence as we have in the US, is that “we don’t have more madmen, we have more guns.” And increasing the amount of armed people out there won’t help this ratio, either.

Right now, the public isn’t ready to believe an argument that Jared Loughner was motivated by right-wing rhetoric. Fortunately, nobody has said that, because it’s the wrong claim to make. Nobody has claimed that crosshairs on a map or talk of “Second Amendment remedies” is specifically to blame (some on the right have blamed heavy metal music and a skull in his backyard, and that’s just as silly). The main claim is that the toxic stew of noxious rhetoric, particularly in Loughner’s home district and home state of Arizona, creates an environment that amps up a lunatic fringe. Loughner couldn’t help but trip over that, and indeed his writings do have a cockeyed resonance to some of the really far-right groups like Posse Comitatus and the Patriot movement. That doesn’t make those practitioners of angry rhetoric culpable, but it sure doesn’t mean what they’re doing helped, either.