It would not be hard to convince many of us who live on the West Coast of the United States of the painfully obvious need for severe gun-restriction laws and attendant gun-control enforcement. We're easy to persuade, California is just that way. Call us crazy, but we recently voted to increase our taxes to support our schools.

In fact, in the early 1990s California's leading daily newspaper had the audacity to publish a series of full-page, richly detailed, sweeping editorials demanding national gun-control legislation and enforcement. The bottom line of the prominent daily's recommendation was that American culture was, frankly, just too immature, adolescent really, to permit official sanction on firearm licentiousness and comprehensive curbs on possession required to maximize public safety.

That was the "powerful" Los Angeles Times speaking, but you can see how uninfluential the paper was on this contentious issue. But it said the right thing, and this is what good newspapers with enlightened management should do.