The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, on gun control bill:

Last week was good for the gun crowd in Congress.

Whether you’re happy about it or not, thank those who helped pass an awful bill: Anne Northup, Mike Sodrel, Ron Lewis, Geoff Davis, Ben Chandler, Hal Rogers, Ed Whitfield, John Hostettler.

This vote produced a justified tirade of criticism from New York’s Republican mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who pointed out that Congress was making it easier to track the origins of tainted spinach than to trace a cache of illegal firearms.

... The Senate should stop the bill, which would, just as he said, “shield rogue gun dealers and hinder access to gun trace data and enforcement action by federal and local law enforcement against dealers.”

There’s a reason it was opposed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Major Cities Chiefs (including Louisville’s Robert White), the International Brotherhood of Police Officers and former officials of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tax and Firearms:

An outlaw 1.2 percent of licensed gun dealers are responsible for more than 57 percent of the weapons found at crime scenes. Yet those are precisely the bad actors whom this bill would protect. The Hutchinson (Kan.) News, on family time:

When we have to create a special day to eat dinner as a family, we have to wonder what we have become.

Maybe we are late to take notice, but some family advocacy groups now have an annual day when they say we should have dinner with our children. As if we don’t the rest of time — or at least not often.

They might be right about that. If so, we do have problems as a society.

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University in New York has marked the fourth Monday in September as “Family Day.” That means you should have had dinner with your kids.

CASA’s research has found that the more often children eat dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs.

We should not think of this as prevention of youth substance abuse nor of having it be just one day in the year. Every day should be family day in a healthy family.

That should go without saying, but as long as we have a need formally to designate a Family Day in this country, we better keep reminding ourselves. Today might not be Family Day, but every night is a good night to sit down at the table together as a family.Star Tribune, Minneapolis, on Congress:

Most Americans won’t have noticed, or cared much, that Congress adjourned last week and left the federal budget in a shambles. Ten of the 12 spending bills that fund annual government operations remain unfinished — even though the new fiscal year started on Saturday — and the required budget blueprint for fiscal 2007 never got past the negotiation stage.

But now that incumbents are home and campaigning for re-election, voters should ask about this sorry performance, for these are the symptoms of a dysfunctional and irresponsible Congress.

... You can’t blame partisan gridlock for this budgetary breakdown. ... Nor can you blame a heavy workload. ...

Rather, it reflects ideological rigidity taken to new extremes. ...

As a governance matter, it meant that it spent so much time casting symbolic votes on symbolic issues — gay marriage, flag-burning, gay marriage again — that it ran out of time to resolve the issues of the day: immigration policy, entitlement spending, global warming, military modernization, lobbying reform.

Voters should not assume that this is par for the course. ... Norman Ornstein, a conservative congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, calls this Congress the “broken branch.” In the next five weeks voters should be asking how candidates will mend it.