The NRA’s comeuppance

Two Democratic senators with top National Rifle Association ratings on Monday started what must be a groundswell for lifesaving gun controls.

Change must echo through the halls of Congress. Not next week, not next month. Now.

As Newtown’s families begin the nightmarish task of burying their sons and daughters, give credit to gun-rights stalwarts Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Warner of Virginia for finally entertaining the possibility of limiting virtually unfettered access to assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

And heap shame upon the dozens of others who remain under the spell of the firearms lobby, which time and again has shrugged off mass murder as someone else’s business.

For example, the business of little Jack Pinto and Noah Pozner, 6-year-olds slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and the families who sent them to their final rest on Monday.

Manchin’s statement of conversion rang with moral clarity and common sense. “Never before have we seen our babies slaughtered,” he said Monday morning. “This has changed where we go from here.” He added, “I don’t know anybody in the sporting or hunting arena that goes out with an assault rifle. I don’t know anyone that needs 30 rounds in a clip to go hunting.”

Added Warner on Monday afternoon, “There’s got to be a way to put reasonable restrictions, particularly as we look at assault weapons, as we look at these fast clips of ammunition.”

But these are only two out of 100 in the Senate — fully half of whose members earned an A or A + for toeing the absolutist NRA line.

The only match for the gun lobby and its money — more than $4 million spent this year, against just $180,000 from pro-gun control groups? The voices of ordinary, outraged Americans.

The people must make their demands clear:

Reinstate the assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004.

Prohibit the sale of high-capacity magazines of the type that enabled Adam Lanza to inflict such carnage in such a short time. Even under the weak pre-2004 ban, they would have been outlawed.

Fix the gun show loophole, which enables purchasers to evade background checks.

Make gun trafficking a felony.

And ensure that names of convicted drug abusers, domestic abusers and hospitalized or adjucated mentally ill — like Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-hui, declared a danger to himself and others by a Virginia judge in 2005 — are added to the federal database against which gun sellers must check prospective buyers.

But we need not wait for laws. President Obama, who spoke so eloquently in Newtown on Sunday, can take decisive action without delay.

He should order every federal agency that comes in contact with potentially dangerous people to add those names to the database. Jared Lee Loughner, who killed six and wounded 13 in Tucson, had been rejected by the Army because of a history of drug use, including prior convictions. That disqualifying record, which should have barred him from buying firearms, was never reported to the FBI.

And Obama should order the Justice Department to prosecute people with criminal records who lie on background check forms when they try to buy guns. In 2009, 71,000 people convicted of gun crimes lied when they tried to purchase firearms; the feds prosecuted a pitiful 77 cases.

Only one thing competes with the excruciating sound of eulogies at children’s funerals: endless excuses by people who claim to be leaders.