"If there was a winner in this week's mayhem, it's gun control advocates," says TIME Denver bureau chief Richard Woodbury. From Colorado to Washington, long-dead legislation is back on the table, single-issue pol Rep. Carolyn McCarthy is back on TV again, and no less a public pulse-taker than Rosie O'Donnell is calling for a near-total ban on guns, England-style. Will Littleton be our Dunblane? The logic is clear enough: Guns may not kill people, but neither do disaffected teens -- until they get a hold of some guns. Keep guns away from those teens, and they can't shoot anyone. But they can still blow plenty of people up with homemade pipe bombs.
After Littleton, Guns Under Fire
LITTLETON: The breakdown of families, alienation at school, Goth culture, violent TV, film and video games, and rock music -- they've all been named as accomplices in the Littleton massacre. Some guilty verdicts have been passed out: An upcoming Marilyn Manson concert has been canceled, and MGM has pulled the film "Basketball Diaries" off of video store shelves because one fantasy scene has a trench-coated Leo DiCaprio spraying his school with bullets. But at week's end, there was a clear leader in the scapegoat derby: Guns.