The Gun Rampage Next Time In a postscript to the Newtown school massacre in Connecticut, a trauma physician from Hartford Hospital has been meeting with experts from medicine, law enforcement and the military to plan better emergency responses to mass shootings so as to improve the chance for survival of gunshot victims. Just as wartime battlefields historically produce advances in trauma medicine, professionals in Connecticut and elsewhere in America where gun violence has become all too common are seeking to improve such emergency care - a development that concedes that future bouts of gun carnage are inevitable. American politicians ducking the need for gun safety should be as responsible in the face of tragedy as the new study group, known as the Hartford Consensus. It formed after the December rampage at Newtown in which a gunman murdered 20 children and six school employees in a matter of minutes. According to The Hartford Courant, doctors from the United States Navy and the F.B.I. and officers from several urban police forces convened in April to follow up on a recommendation from the American College of Surgeons that first responders be better prepared. The recommendation followed a mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., that left 12 people dead and 58 wounded last July. On average, 196 people are shot in this country each day and survive while 86 die from gunfire, 51 in suicides, all made easier by the easy accessibility of weapons. Connecticut has tightened some gun laws, prompting threats from gun makers to move from the state. Their departure would hardly be regrettable, considering the callous statements of gun makers uncovered in court records in various states and reported recently in The Times. "That's not for us to enforce the law," one executive said, indifferent to the lethal risks from sales of multiple weapons to "straw buyers" who peddle them in the black market. The public still does not know where or how the mother of the Newtown shooter purchased the weapons used by her son. That question should have been addressed by now, but a final state police report on the massacre has been postponed until at least September. Connecticut officials have been increasingly intent on preventing full disclosure of all facts in the case. Official obfuscation plays into the hands of the gun lobby's Congressional lackeys, who continue to oppose new laws despite solid popular support for tighter controls on gun sales.