Friday, October 2, 2015

Consistent with the Constitution, What Can We Do About Gun Violence?

Guns don't kill people. People kill people. But they mainly use guns to kill people. Every year twelve thousand Americans are gunned down by other Americans; in addition there are more than twenty thousand American suicides by gun annually. In the past 20 years we have lost over 600,000 Americans to gun violence. That's more than we lost in combat in World War II; twelve times more than we lost in Vietnam; thirty times more than we lost in Korea; one hundred times more than we lost in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined; and three hundred times more than we have lost to terrorists. In fact, over the last 20 years we have lost more Americans to gun violence than we lost in combat in all of our wars and every terrorist attack over the last 80 years.

We think of war as a terrible scourge. Domestic gun violence is four times as deadly as war.

It is way past time for this country to adopt common-sense gun control legislation. What laws would be constitutional?