EDITORIAL: The timing is perfect for productive discussions about preventing the next Aurora movie massacre

There’s no denying the pain from the horror accused movie massacre shooter James Holmes inflicted on Aurora is still raw.

For so many of the victims and families, the agony he caused during his July 20 rampage at the Century 16 Aurora theater will never end.

But elected leaders are dead wrong in saying that in the midst of all this suffering, that the community must wait to discuss the massacre, and how to prevent another one.

The Aurora Sentinel and many prominent national and community leaders are renewing calls to look at gun control and other issues in an effort to prevent another senseless slaughter.

That prompted Gov, John Hickenlooper and others to tell reporters that it’s “too soon” to address whether gun control or anything else might protect the public from people like Holmes.

Too soon? Can’t Hickenlooper and others see that it’s too late for the 12 people Holmes slaughtered, the dozens more he injured, and the hundreds that he terrorized?

Too soon? That’s talking politics, not good sense.

This is exactly the time to convene a bi-partisan panel of state lawmakers and others to address how it is that even after Virginia Tech, after Tucson, after Columbine High School, after Binghamton, after Killeen, so many people who send off signals that real trouble is brewing manage to get powerfully lethal weapons and carry out plans to slaughter people?

These politicians dismiss Colorado residents who don’t want to fall behind the fatalism of those who shrug and say there’s nothing we can do to prevent another senseless massacre.

Colorado and the rest of the country are gearing up for fall elections, and there’s every reason to insist candidates for state legislature, Congress and the White House answer questions about how legislation limiting access to the most lethal of weapons might limit or prevent massacres as they’ve limited them in other parts of the world.

Colorado needs leaders like Hickenlooper and others to explain that gun control isn’t an all-or-none proposition. Just because the U.S. Constitution permits the rights of citizens to carry guns, it doesn’t mean we all have the right to carry weapons of mass destruction, which is what Holmes legally toted into Aurora’s fateful theater.

Colorado needs leaders like President Barack Obama to lead discussions about ways to track who has what kind of ammunition and how much.

No one but the government can lead the state and the country in discussions about how better to spot people like Holmes and act in some way to keep them from carrying out murderous plans.

In a country where we pat down old women at airports and make a scene when  airline passengers bring the wrong size of toothpaste in their carry-on luggage, surely we can require school officials and others to drop a dime when students make it clear that things are going very, very wrong.

It’s simply too jaded to believe that we must resign ourselves to live in a society where we must be afraid to go to the movies, or send our children to school, or attend a political rally.

It is unacceptable to resign ourselves to the insistence of some that America’s special brand of freedom carries a price tag of allowing our to neighbors to carry out mass murder. That’s not freedom; it’s extortion.

It’s not too soon, but absolutely the right time for political candidates and elected leaders to lead discussions about what we can do to prevent the next round of terror. Now, while the public is as tuned into the issue as are the special interest groups that have created the policies and laws we all currently live and suffer under.