One group of Americans was unmoved by the carnage in Texas last week: the Congressmen who voted 247 to 177 to defeat a measure that would have banned 13 different assault weapons and the high-capacity ammunition clips that make those guns even deadlier.
The proposal sought to close a loophole in an existing law on semiautomatic weapons, those rapid-fire guns that require a single squeeze of the trigger for every round discharged. In 1989, two months after a deranged man with a semiautomatic murdered five children at a Stockton, Calif., elementary school, President Bush was persuaded to place a ban on...
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