A SHAMEFUL DAY FOR WASHINGTON!

       Yes, score one for the good guys in rejecting a GOP measure to permit people to carry concealed weapons across state lines, but other than that the Senate failed miserably yesterday to move ahead on gun legislation. Their failure to pass even a watered down version of the gun legislation that the vast majority of Americans are appealing for, prompted the President to sound forth in the Rose Garden in an uncharacteristically strong expression of his obvious disgust with those Senators who still are refusing to respond to the tragedies of Newtown, Aurora, and elsewhere. "All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington," he declared.
        The emotional pleas from the families of Newtown victims and the urging of former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who is herself a recovering victim of the 2011 Arizona mass shooting, and her astronaut husband Mark Kelly were to no avail.

"Our hearts are broken. Our spirit is not."

        Despite their great disappointment the Newtown families vowed to carry on their fight for gun legislation. "Our hearts are broken. Our spirit is not," said Mark Barden, whose seven-year-old son Daniel was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.
        Giffords and her husband issued a joint statement following the Senate vote charging that  the Senate "ignored the will of the American people. . . We will use every means possible to make sure the constituents of these senators know that their elected representatives ignored them, and put Washington, D.C. special interest politics over the effort to keep their own communities safer from the tragedy of gun violence."
        After Vice President Biden, who was presiding over the Senate, announced that the proposed legislation had been defeated, a woman in the gallery cried out, “Shame on you!” She echoed the words I expressed in yesterday’s blog post, and what every reasonable American should be feeling toward every one of those members of the Senate and House who are preventing the passage of the gun legislation.
        Shame on you!