The President is right about gun control

Responding to yesterday's heartbreaking mass shooting in Oregon, I have to say, enough is enough. I don't know what I would do if gun violence broke out where M works and she was threatened, and I'm tired of the 2nd Amendment arguments. A "well-regulated militia" is not what we have in this country, and the President is right to question whether the founders could imagine our current weaponized world, when the most deadly weapon they knew of was a musket or a cannon. Also, the regulations we have on the books are clearly not enough. Gun control can work better than it does now. We Americans love our guns, but do we really need the technology of death that we have now in the hands of all these lunatics?

Preventing a dangerously deranged person from getting access to guns is one way to try to stop these tragedies before they start. Better access to mental health services and things like that can also help, but without the force of law enforcement focusing on gun control, I don't think additional mental health resources will do the trick. Why not try to improve the system we have, instead of rolling back to a forgotten past?

Pres. Obama called for "common-sense" gun laws in a speech from the White House today. He failed to specify what laws those are in his speech, but V.P. Joe Biden put together a plan to reduce gun violence that is on the White House website (www.whitehouse.gov) under "violence prevention," which specifies what the President is after:

"The single most important thing we can do to prevent gun violence and mass shootings is to make sure those who would commit acts of violence cannot get access to guns. Right now, federally licensed firearms dealers are required to run background checks on those buying guns, but studies estimate that nearly 40 percent of all gun sales are made by private sellers who are exempt from this requirement. A national survey of inmates found that only 12 percent of those who used a handgun in a crime acquired it from a retail store or pawn shop, where a background check should have been run.

Congress should pass legislation that goes beyond closing the “gun show loophole” to require background checks for all firearm sales, with limited, common-sense exceptions for cases like certain transfers between family members and temporary transfers for hunting and sporting purposes."

The President also failed to mention that the Charleston, S.C., shooter mistakenly passed a federal background check when he purchased the gun used in that mass shooting. So would a more comprehensive background check system prevent gun violence? I think it would. A more comprehensive system would have to include all 50 states -- 17 states had less than 10 mentally ill people in the background check system, according to the White House plan -- and would have to avoid procedural problems, which is what plagued the FBI investigator doing the background check on the Charleston shooter. The system can and should be improved and expanded to include private gun sales. Gun shows like the massive ones we have here in town ought to be regulated just as heavily as pawn shops and retail stores.

The President challenged news organizations to put the number of U.S. gun deaths up against the number of Americans killed by terrorists in the past decade side-by-side, and NBC News obliged tonight. I'm not sure I would have done that as a news editor at NBC, but the statistic shocked me. It was over 153,000 people killed by guns over 10 years, compared to more than 3,000 killed on 9/11. That's roughly 50 times as many people killed. And the comparison is scary -- how much money goes into international efforts to fight terrorism vs. "everyday" gun violence? I once did a news story about a young man killed by a gun shot through his bedroom window. My editor at the time told me that every death has a story to it, and it's true. Every death is someone's life, ended. I don't think I did a very good job of conveying that person's death or life, but it opened my eyes ever so slightly to how a gun shot, intentional or not, can have the ultimate impact. Another news story in Time magazine many years ago tallied every gun death in America for a week. I was shocked by how many there were, and then shocked again that many of them were middle-aged men committing suicide or accidental deaths.