UPDATE (8/6): For the record, according to reporting by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, the shooter who murdered three women and wounded nine others at a Pittsburgh-area fitness club held a permit from the State of Pennsylvania to carry concealed weapons.
Two weeks ago, gun violence prevention organizations helped defeat a bill in Congress that would have allowed this killer to carry his loaded weapon almost anywhere in the country.
About three months ago, Congress approved legislation that would have allowed this killer to carry his loaded weapons in nearly every national park in the country.
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Another in a long line of hateful, murderous shootings occurred last night in Pennsylvania.
According to reports, a man -- apparently consumed with a long-simmering anger concerning women and heavily armed -- walked into a suburban Pittsburgh fitness club where he was a member, and found a dance class with a number of women.
The killer reportedly turned off the lights, and then fired over 40 rounds of ammunition into the room in about a minute, killing at least three people and wounding another nine or more.
Then, like so many of these suicide shooters, he killed himself.
If President Obama and our other elected officials believe this incident is worthy of their attention at all, hopefully they will promise to explore ways to prevent such rampages in the future, rather than merely express "deep sadness" -- along with an unstated hope that America's gun violence problem somehow will just go away on its own.
This "nothing new that we can do" approach didn't work after the Amish school shootings in Pennsylvania in October 2006, or the Pittsburgh police killings earlier this year, and yesterday's massacre shows that it's not working now.
It's obviously too easy for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons in this country.
(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)