Let's Talk About Gun Control!

The New York Times has a great op-ed by Nicholas Krystof today "Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?" where he brings up the topic of sensible gun control in light of the horrific massacre of 20 children under 10 and 7 adults at an elementary school in Newtown, CT on Friday morning.

Here's an important excerpt:

The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns. 

Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence. 

So let’s treat firearms rationally as the center of a public health crisis that claims one life every 20 minutes. The United States realistically isn’t going to ban guns, but we can take steps to reduce the carnage.

and then he goes on to make some concrete suggestions that has improved the situation in other countries:

Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands. 

The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings. 

In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half. 

Or we can look north to Canada. It now requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching for them.

How much longer are people going to let the National Rifle Association prevent reasonable regulations on gun ownership that would help reduce the 30,000 Americans who are killed by these instruments of death every year? Come on, people! Let's talk about gun control.