Who countenanced Bernard McGuirk calling Hillary Clinton a "bitch" who'd "have cornrows and gold teeth before this fight with Obama is over"

Well, I mean, did you hear her at that church in Alabama? Why does she get a pass on an offensive imitation of stereotypically black speech and co-opting the rhetoric of a civil rights struggle she wasn't a part of, but this McGuirk guy (I assume he must be this Imus guy's radio sidekick) can't point that she's trying to "out-black" the guy? I mean, trenchant analysis, that line's not, but it sounds to me topical enough that I'll bet I know what he's referring to.

Am I the only one that looks at these statistics:

http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds_dying.jpg

And thinks to themselves that democrats, in fact liberals in general, have better things to spend their political capital on than a contentious issue where the payoff--reducing gun deaths--is likely to save far fewer lives than marginal increases in suicide prevention or automobile safety?

I am a progressive, and used to be, on principle, a big gun-control guy, despite, or perhaps because of, my youth in gun-crazy Texas, a place where advocating gun control doesn't do much other than gaining a lot of enemies. Then I started looking at the actual statistics, and decided I've got better things to do with my life, and better causes to piss people off over.

If all the guns in the United States were to disappear tomorrow, the murder rate would not go down by 71%, although 71% of all murders in the US are committed using a firearm, and although 61% of suicides in the US are aided by firearm, I seriously doubt you'd see any such reduction in suicide; probably a far smaller reduction than with homicide, even.

I'm curious to know why I'm wrong, or why I should care overly much about those 32 poor souls taken out by an errant madman in Virginia. I suspect he'd have done nearly as well with explosives made from easily-obtainable substances, as we are reminded on a near-constant basis by daily events in Iraq.