Next: Armed Guards For Firefighters. Then a Permanent State of Combat for Everyone

Another town, this one in upstate New York, has seen Christmas shattered as another waste of humanity guns down responding firefighters with apparently the same Bushmaster rifle as that used in Newtown, Connecticut earlier this bloody month.  The killer's motive, plainly expressed in a typewritten note left behind, appears to have been his own amusement. And of course, since he was armed to the teeth, he was able to indulge it thoroughly.Clenched-fist rage at the shooter is both understandable and a waste of time, just as it has been with almost every pathetic monstrosity whose final act of cowardice- suicide- has put justice out of reach since Columbine and long before.What, then, will be Wayne LaPierre and the NRA's solution now? Armed guards for firefighters and first responders? I suppose we'll soon need them for postal carriers, UPS drivers and so on ad infinitum. Indeed, the answer is to become a permanently hyper-vigilant society resembling more a forward operating base than a civilized nation. The standard will be unrelenting preparedness for combat at all times, whether at Sunday dinner, a little league ball game or an errand as simple as picking up a Christmas tree.There will no longer be any such thing as too careful. And if a populace armed to the teeth experiences accidental or panicked discharges, explosive ends to otherwise non-deadly arguments, bystander manslaughter, increased suicides or any other of the unintended consequences of killing tools in the wildly inconsistent hands of would be heroes, we'll have to shrug and insist that only people, and not armed people, are responsible for bodies, lives and futures torn to pieces by firearms.If nothing else, this will certainly spike gun sales, so perhaps the NRA and its supporting industry have a method to their madness after all. If they can convince the rest of us to indulge it, they'll have the powder keg of a country they clearly covet. The rest of us can at least claim our "freedom" as we prepare, as always, to duck, crouch, fire, and die. Or scream. Or weep.