Keller @ Large: Isn't There More We Can Do To Stop This?

BOSTON (CBS) - There are plenty more details to come about the deranged loser who slaughtered 26 congregants at a rural Texas church, most notably – where and how did he get his weapons?

But we are already in receipt of enough information to know this guy was a giant neon sign flashing "danger" for years before this atrocity. Abusing his wife and children, thrown out of the Air Force, and of course, the classic symptom of the mass killer – animal abuse.

I hope most people would agree that this is not the kind of person we want having access to a Ruger AR-556 rifle, a Glock 9mm and a Ruger .22 caliber, the weapons he bought that we know about so far.

Yes, he could have attacked those parishioners with a knife, a truck, a can of gasoline and a lighter.

But short of a bomb or a hijacked airplane, nothing kills large numbers of innocent people more efficiently than a gun, a lesson we've been taught over and over and over again. Reason enough for reasonable people to wonder if there isn't more we could do to keep neon danger signs from getting their hands on these weapons.

The problem is, there don't seem to be enough reasonable people to generate action.

Right after President Trump took office, the Republicans rushed to repeal an Obama-era rule ordering the Social Security Administration to share with the gun buyer background-check names of recipients with mental problems so severe they need a third party to manage their benefits.

Speaker Ryan complained that people's rights were being "infringed."

This weekend, the right to life of 26 innocent people was severely infringed.

That seems like something really worth complaining about.