Molly Ivins June 22

AUSTIN, Texas — Aw, I'm so sorry they didn't pass that gun-control bill. We could have been the only country on Earth with a gun-control law that weakened gun control but allowed the Ten Commandments to be put on the schoolhouse wall.

Given the angry tenor of our gun-control debates, I foresee the hostile question: "And are you against putting the Ten Commandments on the schoolhouse wall?"

Who am I to dispute the impeccable logic of the argument "Well, it couldn't hurt"? It couldn't hurt to make all the schoolkids read Homer and learn to tie a bowline either. I vote we put that in our next gun-control law.

Accustomed as I am to listening to Texas legislators bloviate for hours on end, I found nothing odd in U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay's arguments against gun control.

"Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud," said DeLay, in the course of explaining to us why 12 students and a teacher were shot to death by two other students in Littleton, Colo.

Obviously, being taught that we are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud is enough to drive anyone to violence; the mere thought makes you want to go out and shoot a dozen or so teenagers, doesn't it? But in the interests of fairness, I should point out that Tom DeLay himself is exceptionally good evidence for the theory that man is descended from monkeys. And damn recently, too.

By way of further proving that guns had nothing to do with the deaths in Littleton, DeLay asserted: "We have sterilized and contracepted our families down to sizes so small that the children we do have are so spoiled with material things that they have come to equate the receiving of the material with love. ... We place our children in day-care centers where they learn their socialization skills among their peers under the law of the jungle."

Admit it — you never thought to link contraception with gun control. Or day care, either. You thought that all those little kids in the day-care centers were singing "The Teensy-Weensy Spider Crawled Up the Waterspout." That's all YOU know about social decay.

DeLay blames all of this — the theory of evolution, birth control, small family size, day care, abortion and moral relativism — for the shootings in Littleton.

He does not blame guns. He blames liberals.

Now, we liberals are not noted for advocating violence.

I think you will have to admit (no matter how much you may dislike us) that liberals, on the whole, do not favor violence. If anything, we are recognized for a sort of wimpy insistence on kindness to everyone. We like people to be nice to each other. We keep trying to get them not to call each other ugly names. Mass murder has never been part of the liberal agenda. Honest.

I know we all like to figure out whom to blame when something awful happens, but it is not a particularly useful exercise. What we are trying to figure out is how to keep this from happening again.

Whether the teen killers in Colorado were driven berserk by being taught evolutionary theory or were just Bad Seed, I submit to you, as a simple and self-evident proposition, that they could not have injured and killed so many people if they had not had guns. If they had come into Columbine High School, pointed their index fingers at the kids they didn't like and said, "Bang, bang, you're dead!" not much would have happened as a consequence.

To address a tedious point, it is quite true that no law can assure that guns will not get into the hands of criminals and lunatics. But laws can make it much less likely that they will. The Brady law alone has kept tens of thousands of people with criminal or mental records from buying guns in just a few years.

You may say that we already have such laws. The purpose of the late lamented gun-control bill was to close some glaring loopholes in those laws.

Of course, I've heard dumber debates than the one that Congress just staged on gun control. I cover the Texas Legislature. But even by Texas legislative standards, that was pathetic and ridiculous. One could just leave it with the contempt that those nincompoops so richly deserve, except that there was one grown-up in the whole mess.

Carolyn McCarthy is a congresswoman from Long Island. She ran for office after her husband was shot down by a lunatic with a gun on a commuter train. Her primary mission in public office is to pass laws that will help keep guns out of the hands of lunatics, criminals and children.

As the hours passed and members said things like "Guns are a two- edged sword" (sorry, I didn't get his name) and "We all need to understand that you cannot stand up for America — you need to kneel down for America and stand up for God" (DeLay again), you could actually see the pain on McCarthy's face being etched deeper and deeper.

By 1:30 in the morning, when she stood to close on her bill, her face was an incarnation of grief.

"I will not cry," said McCarthy, her voice wobbling very slightly. "But I will beg."

It did no good. Grieving women don't contribute as much money to political campaigns as the National Rifle Association does.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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