The shooting in Colorado has caused a tempest of gun-control fury. But as radio talker Neal Boortz points out, 14 people just died Sunday night in the wreck of a crowded pickup on the U.S.-Mexican border in Texas, filled with foreigners.

Another nine died in a similar crash in April when a crowded truck was fleeing Border Patrol.

Why don’t such incidents enrage the public into demanding border control? Or, as Boortz facetiously suggested, pickup control?

How is it “compassionate” to allow illegal immigration when such dangers are inherent? Is it compassionate to implicitly encourage human smugglers to truck illegals in at night, as loaded up as possible to maximize profitability, because they know we don’t have the wherewithal to stop them or the gumption to turn them back?

There were 23 people stuffed into that pickup Sunday.

“In my 38 years as an officer, this is one of the worst fatalities I have been to,” an officer told reporters at the scene of Sunday’s wreck. “I have never seen where we had that many in a vehicle.”

Nineteen illegals also died in a 2003 incident in which they succumbed to heat and dehydration while trapped in a tractor-trailer taking them to Houston.

All these lives are worth no less than those taken in Aurora. Yet our border continues to be porous, and an attractive nuisance capable of causing death.

When will America elect a leader who will get this done?

Isn’t it a matter of life and death?