Opinion: Columns
Tuesday, June 19th, 2018 3:56 PM
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I agree with Ray Simpson's statement, "Congress would need to create new laws to force gun owners into compliance and then convince the judiciary to enforce those laws. Key to this … is to convince bad individuals to start to comply with the rules of modern society." [Practical thoughts on gun violence, Viewpoints, June 13]
This is exactly the crux of the matter when it comes to gun violence: Bad people will not comply with any such rules precisely because they are bad. With approximately 300 million guns in private hands in the U.S., bad people (and people who have a serious mental health problem or crisis) will never have much difficulty obtaining a gun to do harm to others or themselves.
So how to reduce the risk that people who should not have access to guns cannot obtain a gun? First, and perhaps immediately most effective, is to require by local ordinance or state or federal statute that gun owners store their guns safely in a way that they cannot be stolen or accessed by others who do not have a gun license, such as a household member who might want to kill him/herself or others. Such an ordinance or law could be aggressively enforced by prosecuting anyone whose gun is stolen and retrieved by police when used in a crime, or anyone whose gun is used by someone else to commit suicide.
Second, universal background checks on each and every transfer of gun ownership
