THE NEWS SAYS

The loved ones of the Charleston victims have shown us the finest the human heart has to offer.

The National Rifle Association board member who blamed the Rev. Clementa Pinckney for the nine murders in the Emanuel AME Church exposed the organization’s stone-cold lack of conscience. Charles Cotton pinned the bloodshed on Pinckney because, as a state senator, the minister opposed legislation that would have let South Carolina residents carry concealed weapons in churches. Thus, Cotton said, Pinckney had barred his Bible-class members from possibly stopping shooter Dylann Roof with a bullet.

“Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue,” Cotton declared in as grotesque a statement of NRA orthodoxy as has ever been uttered.

The group’s longstanding belief in guns, guns and more guns, in allowing guns here, there and everywhere as the answer to gun violence and mass killings, is patently insane.

But far more offensive was Cotton’s unfounded presumption that at least one of the people who prayed with Pinckney had harbored a desire to study scripture strapped with a pistol.

Pinckney believed not only in keeping guns out of church but in sensibly regulating their possession. He had once sponsored legislation that would have required dealers to conduct extensive background checks, including reviewing family background and medical and psychological evaluations.

Roof killed the nine not with an assault weapon, but with a pistol. A pending felony charge should have disqualified him from possessing the gun even in South Carolina.

Undoubtedly, universally applying the screening envisioned by Pinckney would have been even more effective. NRA resistance to such a safeguard is the real reason that innocent people are dying.