EDMUND BURKEThere was another mass shooting today, this time at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. According to preliminary reports nearly thirty people are dead – more than twenty of them young children.
How long will America continue to tolerate this madness?
As a public policy matter, the problem of mass shootings is not difficult: Large-capacity gun magazines should not be available to the general public.
Gun-control opponents like to say that the problem is not guns but people. It is an argument designed to confuse the dimwitted. Mass slaughters occur because madmen obtain dangerous weapons. The simple reality is that it is possible to control guns, but not possible to control emotionally disturbed people. We can’t always identity them, and even when we can, we can’t always predict if they will be dangerous. We have three choices: (1) We can lock up a lot of people who we think might possibly be dangerous, and keep many of them locked up indefinitely. (2) We can continue to put up with horrors like the one today. (3) We can control guns.
The Supreme Court has declared that citizens have a constitutional right to possess handguns for self-defense in their own homes. It’s not a ruling I agree with, but it is the law of the land. So be it. But we can restrict the number of rounds that guns – both handguns and long guns – can accommodate. We should ban guns and gun magazines that hold more than, perhaps, five rounds. Under those circumstances, someone would have to switch gun magazines six times to fire thirty rounds. Today gun magazines that hold thirty rounds are common. Some magazines hold seventy-five rounds.
I just heard President Obama say, “We are going to have to come together to take meaningful action, regardless of the politics.” Let us pray that this time Americans – including politicians long intimidated by the gun lobby – make the President’s words come true.
UPDATE (December 15, 2012): Gail Collins put it this way in her New York Times column today: ""Every country has a sizable contingent of mentally ill citizens. We're the ones that gives them the technological power to play god.""