The Second Amendment, and the way it has recently been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, makes most bills that attempt to bar or inhibit Americans from possessing guns futile.

On the flip side, the resistance of many Americans to surrendering to a totally armed populace has made it difficult to pass new laws that repeal or liberalize gun possession restrictions.

Last month, Arizona’s gun-toter-in-chief, Sen. Ron Gould, R-Lake Havasu City, has once again proposed an omnibus gun bill that includes allowing college students and faculty to pack heat on campus.

Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a similar Gould bill last year but not because the state’s community college boards, university presidents and faculty organizations were nearly unanimous in opposition. Brewer’s beef was with vague language.

So Gould crafted a new bill this year that allows people with a concealed-carry permit to keep their guns in their pants (or purse) while on campus. If a college doesn’t want guns in the classroom, it has to provide storage lockers and metal detectors at all entrances to buildings, a cost so prohibitive it’s almost guaranteed not to happen.

College leaders and administrators are once-again lining up in opposition. In doing so, they run out a parade of horribles to illustrate the harm pistol-packing students and teachers will cause. Why, it will be Armageddon – drunken college students shooting up dorms and fraternities, running gun battles in the halls; mass hysteria.

Except it won’t happen. Four states – Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin and Mississippi- already allow guns on campus and so far nothing bad has happened. Nor is it likely to happen.

The common counter to that data is Virginia Tech, in which a student in 2007 killed more than 30 students and teachers. Or locally, the UA Nursing School shooting in 2002 in which a student killed three teachers.

How could those shootings happen when Virginia and Arizona banned guns on campuses? It happened because both shooters were insane. Funny thing about the insane, they tend not to care what the law says.

Guns can’t be banned because of the Second Amendment. But a 2008 Supreme Court ruling, District of Columbia v. Heller, has opened the door to regulating how they can be possessed outside of the home.

In that ruling (and a subsequent 2010 ruling), the court disconnected guns from regulated militias and ruled that the Second Amendment allowed Americans to keep guns in their homes for self defense. It didn’t extend that protection to persons and has raised questions about what happens to guns outside of the home.

Some states are taking advantage of that ruling and seeking tighter restrictions on gun possession, other states, such as Arizona, are taking the opposite tack and loosening gun restrictions.

The early data show that states that have tightened gun laws have seen no marked decrease in gun violence. Yet the same goes for states that have loosened gun laws – there has been no marked increase in gun violence.

Morever, as a society, we seem to have a high tolerance for gun violence. According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 100,000 people suffer gunshot wounds in America every year and about a third of them die. (That’s a higher casualty rate than most wars America has fought.)

Of those who died, more than half were suicides. The majority of the rest were shootings connected to drug dealing.

Gun restriction advocates like to say that strict controls on gun ownership, or even eradication will lower the numbers of killed and wounded. Hardly. There are nearly 200 million firearms in American homes. Irrespective of the Second Amendment, there’s no realistic way to get rid of those guns, which means criminals and depressives will still have access to them.

On the other hand, gun rights advocates like to argue that if all Americans carried a gun, crime would plummet because any time a ne’er-do-well drew his gat, an army of pistol-packing mammas and papas would draw their shootin’ irons and gun the varmint down. That will never happen. Morever, if it ever did, the crossfire from all the missed shots would be more likely to kill bystanders than bad guys.

So the argument that we’ll be less safe if everyone’s got a gun is just as specious that we’ll be safer if everyone does.

Most of the gun violence in this country (other than suicides) is committed by people involved in the illicit drug trade. Solve the illegal drug problem in America and the amount of gun violence will fall precipitously.

Pass Gould’s bill or don’t, it won’t really matter. College campuses will be just as safe (or dangerous, depending on your perspective) if some faculty and students have concealed guns than if they didn’t.

The President of the United States can’t fix what’s wrong with America.

You wouldn’t know that from listening to the presidential campaign rhetoric from the Republicans who want to replace the current POTUS or from the POTUS himself.

They all sound like the President is a dictator who can do wondrous things by mere decree.

He can’t. He needs the Congress. And the Congress is what’s wrong with America.

The country remains stuck in the economic doldrums as it tries to recover from a brutal recession yet the Congress last year passed only 90 laws, the fewest in 20 years.

Among the substantial, transformative legislation they passed were bills that: Named several post offices; Created a new postage stamp; Required the president to continue to support Democracy in Belarus; Authorized the presentation of American flags to the families of civilian U.S. employees killed in the line of duty; reformed the American Legion charter; created rules and regulations for the America’s Cup yacht race; and named a few more post offices.

If changing names on post offices could resurrect the housing market, repair the nation’s crumbling transportation infrastructure, bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas or lower the unemployment rate, why we’d be in the pink.

Some Constitutional scholars argue that government inaction is the way the government is supposed to work. The system of checks and balances prevents any majority from running roughshod over any minority. And when the country is evenly divided politically, as it is now, little can be accomplished because the rules empower dissenters.

But it’s hard to imagine that the Framers of the Constitution had this level of legislative paralysis in mind.

According to a December Gallup Poll, Americans’ distaste for Congress is at an all time high. Nearly 9 out of 10 Americans are unhappy with the Congress and want it to change.

But there’s an amount of cognitive dissonance in that poll. While Congress as a whole is despised, district-by-district polls of individual Congressional members show much higher approval ratings. So we hate the Congress, but love our Congress member. That makes no sense.

That dissonance showed up in the past three Congressional elections when the Congress as a whole had 80 percent or more disapproval ratings yet 85 to 95 percent of incumbents won re-election.

This is an election year. Every seat in the House of Representatives is up for election and one-third of the Senate. It’s up to us to elect candidates who will work together when necessary and not wing nuts who pine for the government of the 19^th Century or who want to mandate we all eat Tofu and have solar panels on our roofs.

If we want the POTUS – whomever it ends up being – to lead the nation back to robust prosperity and low unemployment we must elect a Congress that will be a full partner in solving the nation’s problems not one that can only agree what name to give a post office.

Imagine a man who lives on a large cul de sac and is harassed by a loathsome neighbor at the end of the road.

The neighbor and his two terrible sons are really rotten. He bullies the other neighbors, infringes on their property lines and causes disruptions and disturbances in the neighborhood with abandon.

One day our imagined man gets a phone call from a trusted friend. He tells him he has heard from another friend that the horrible neighbor has a stockpile of weapons and is conspiring with a gang from a couple of streets away to kill our imagined man.

Having finally had enough, our imagined man rallies a few of the neighbors (though most didn’t want to have anything to do with it), grabs a shotgun and storms down to the end of the cul de sac and kills the loathsome neighbor and his two terrible sons. He threatens the neighbor’s wife and other, younger children with harm, shoots holes in all of the family’s vehicles and for good measure burns down the house.

While standing in the street marveling at his mission accomplished, he gets a call from the friend again, who says there is no stockpile of weapons and no conspiracy. The friend’s friend made up the story.

Oops.

“Oh well,” says our imagined man as he goes back home, “he deserved it, anyway.”

For the above scenario the part of the wrathful man is played by the United States and the loathsome neighbor played by Iraq.

On Dec. 15 the Iraq War officially ended. There’s a reason there is no rejoicing in the street, no parades, no banner headlines proclaiming VI Day.

The war was the most shameful escapade in American history.

We must all wear the cloak of shame. It’s all of our faults. America is a democracy and we let this happen. We held no one accountable. In fact, we rewarded with reelection those responsible for the most colossal, most egregious intelligence failure in American history.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no conspiracy between al Qaida and Iraq. There was no clear and present danger to the country.

At best, we sent young men and women into harm’s way on a mistake, at worst, on a lie.

Yet rather than outrage, there’s a shrug of the shoulders. We’ve even refused to pay for it. We’ve insisted on tax cuts rather than a tax increase to pay for the $1 trillion cost of the war. Apparently, we needed the tax savings to buy a new flat screen TV or the maintenance fee on a timeshare. War? What war?

The best most of us could do about the war was to put a magnetic yellow ribbon on the back of our cars and trucks because you have to support the troops; they were just following order after all.

Perhaps. But the crass and craven men who gave them those orders had neither the honor nor the courage to admit their mistakes. No one was fired or drummed out of public service forever for their incompetence. There is no honor in American government anymore, only corrupt Machiavellian ambition.

But blame and shame cannot lie solely with the Bush administration and the Congress.

No, this is the shame of a nation.

We’re a democracy. We let this happen.

Shame on all of us.