Ross Baker, Rutgers University political science professor, wants to know what happened to the legislative fashion of gun control. In today's Los Angeles Times, Baker laments "There was a time that high-profile killings such as the 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. brought passionate cries for limitations on handguns."
Passionate, if delusive. To clarify, Sirhan Sirhan was an exception to millions who purchased a pistol in late 1960s America and did not happen to use it in political assassination or another crime. And to reprove, James Earl Ray's murder weapon was a rifle, not a handgun — and obtained quite illegally, as Ray was a fugitive convict at the time.