The statistics don't lie: guns kill thousands of American children every year. It is an epidemic of slaughter unparalleled in any other industrialized democracy, yet nothing is done. After every fresh massacre the public becomes further desensitized to the violence even as we are told we cannot and should not talk about the reasons why thousands of our children continue to die violent, bloody and needless deaths. American gun deaths are unique in their inability to generate political action: no one seemed to care much about the politicization of the deaths at Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center. Those thousands of needless deaths required major political action. But the needless deaths of thousands of children at the barrel of a gun barely registers a mention from elected officials.