Mississippi lawmakers should be ashamed of themselves. Once again they’ve done nothing, absolutely zero regarding the controversial state flag.

Lawmakers refused to consider more than a dozen bills regarding the flag, allowing them to simply die when a Tuesday deadline for action passed.

Mississippi’s current state flag design is the last state flag in America to contain images of the Confederacy.

Some of the bills that were ignored to death this week called for various solutions to finding a new flag — from forming committees to research designs to simply promoting a new, existing design.

Other bills took the opposite view and sought to mandate the flag’s use by government agencies with penalties for failure to do so.

The latter bills were introduced in anger sparked by many cities, counties and universities that have chosen in protest not to fly the current flag.

The fact that our own state universities find the flag too offensive to fly should provide legislators a clue that this issue is important and worth acting on, not ignoring it and hoping it will just solve itself.

Lawmakers need to take a stand and put the matter to votes.

But our state has a history of electing people to elected positions who don’t have the guts to lead.

The flag is an issue, regardless of how much lawmakers want it to go away.

And our legislators need to own the issue. They either need to stand up and proudly say they support the current flag in spite of its use by racist groups or they need to support finding a flag that all Mississippians can proudly salute.