The shooting rampage Sunday at the Wisconsin Sikh Temple outside Milwaukee has got to prompt serious soul-searching about our out-of-control gun policies in this country.

Although President Obama's timely words of condolence strike the right note, once again the President did not seriously address the main problem: that the floridly psychotic, violent racists, and anyone else who attends a gun show or chooses to order thousands of rounds of ammunition online, has easy access to weapons like the two semiautomatic handguns the temple gunman apparently used.

This is not a hunting issue. It is not an issue of self defense. It is a question, as the President himself put it after the horrible massacre in a Colorado movie theater, of whether automatic weapons belong in the hands of soldiers, or of anyone who cares to use them.

It is, as Mitt Romney put it when he signed an assault weapons ban as governor of Massachusetts, a question of whether we allow easy access to weapons that have no other purpose than to hunt and kill people.

Neither President Obama, Mitt Romney, nor the leaders of both political parties in Congress will take up legislative solutions: renewing the federal assault weapons ban, the Brady Bill, or, Senator Lautenberg's common sense proposal to ban the sale of magazines that fire off more than ten rounds at a single trigger squeeze.

That is because both parties are hostages of the NRA ( See 'Time to Stand Up To The Gun Nuts')

But the American people owe nothing to the NRA. People of good  will and common sense have to come together to put an end to the insanity and protect our basic right to live in a country where
innocent people are not routinely gunned down in movie theaters and places of worship.

Enough is enough.

The idea that nothing can be done, or that the answer is more guns in the hands of more would-be vigilantes, is an obvious lie.

We have to stand up to this evil. How many more of these tragedies can we allow?

If you liked this article by Ruth Conniff, the political editor of The Progressive, check out her story "Time to Stand Up to the Gun Nuts."

Follow Ruth Conniff @rconniff on Twitter