They were called Siberians when I worked for government. 

Siberians were people who had been relegated to out-of-the way offices and would never again be given anything to do.  Exile to Siberia usually came as a direct reward for having done an especially outstanding job (a real no-no in government employment).

Doing an outstanding job, you see, sends ones co-workers who have spent the past thirty years NOT doing theirs into a frenzy of terror. In addition, doing an outstanding job usually means that you are not A TEAM PLAYER, since good work in government invariable uncovers that slimy underlayer of corruption, incompetence, laziness, cowardice, self-interest, and downright lack of logical reasoning ability that is just beneath the surface of every government agency.

In government employment it is really true that no good deed goes unpunished, and no integrity untrampled by the hordes of imbeciles and nincompoops, jealously guarding a territory they know very well they do not deserve.

Knowing what I did about Siberians from working for state government, it didn't take me very long at all to realize that Helen Irvine was a Siberian when, something like a hundred years ago, I first started working for the Justice Department. 

Hidden in a small smoke-filled office (you could still do that in those days), off a little-used corridor, Helen Irvine sat and smoked and read newspapers all day long.  She looked for all the world like that photograph of Lillian Hellman wearing a mink - snide, cynical and wrinkled.

I liked the way she looked, and it didn't take her long to introduce herself.  She evidently recognized a fellow-traveler.

I was standing in the doorway to her office one day discussing something horrid that had just happened, something like the Columbine shooting, one of those things which indicates beyond any reasonable person's doubt that the culture and the society have reached the pit of hell. 

Some bright spark stopped by to join us for a few minutes, probably just to find out what we were talking about.  Most people in government employment harbor the secret delusion that they are undercover agents.  The spark remarked that we needed to fund some research on the matter under discussion. 

Helen gave a not very attractive, but , to me, very amusing snort of contempt.

"Research." She said, nodding her head and taking a great toke off that cigarette she always held.  "Fund some more research."

She raised her penciled-in eye brows.  "Maybe we could appoint a commission to study the issue."

The spark glanced nervously at me, sensing that he was being taken the micky out of big time.  But, Helen had no mercy.

"Honey, we don't need any research," she said acidly. "We've spent billions on research.  We don't need any more commissions.  We don't need any more studies.  We just need the g.. d... courage to implement what we already know."

I thought of Helen in the weeks after Columbine, when all the pundits were arguing and bickering over what the REAL causes of the tragedy were.  Murderous video games, violent television, pornography, alienation, the availability of guns and ammunition, hate, a contempt for human life and dignity, parents who let their children be raised by other children, a male culture that is perverted with all the wrong values.  We already know these things contribute to violence.  We just don't have the courage or the will or the energy anymore to do anything about it but whine and act like it's all a big mystery that we just have to do something about.

So, true to form, the Republican-controlled Senate worked hard to reject restrictions on sales at gun shows.  The final vote was 50-50 and the tie broken only by Vice President Gore.

Gun restrictions interfere with what Mollie Ivins calls: "bid bizzness" interests (that's Texan for Big Business).  And, God knows we can't do that. Besides, I think 16 year-olds with semi-automatic weapons and bomb making material was just what the Framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote of a "well regulated militia."