WOW: Guns to surpass car accidents as leading cause of deaths among young people

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189. There is no doubt that our opinions on a good appraoch to gun control differ but I still feel ...

that we both would love to see gun violence decrease.

Your approach appears to me to be to elect more Democrats to office who will strongly support strong gun legislation that will be quite similar to that in Great Britain. The problem is that there are in our nation 80,000,000 gun owners and members of their families who own and use firearms and place great value on them. The gun culture in our nation is unlike that in any other nation and unlikely to change. Gun owners largely disagree with implementing another assault weapons ban as they realize that it will be just one step in a process that will eventally include banning all semiautomatic firearms and all handguns.

If gun bans were truly popular with most Americans, we would have them by now.

Perhaps we simply should allow honest and sane citizens who do not suffer from serious mental issues to own firearms. Legislation could be passed that will help insure that only such citizens buy purchase firearms and we can take measures to stop straw purchases and gun smuggling. We could also end our failed War on Drugs which would help reduce the violence caused by drug gangs.

A high percentage of gun owners might vote for politicians who promised to safeguard the right to own firearms under the Second Amendment but also to better regulate firearms in order to assure that they were as much as possible in the hands of responsible and well trained individuals. This might get more Democrats elected to national office where they can do a lot of good for our nation not only on gun control but on many other issues.

Your approach can work at the state level as New York State, for one, passed a strong gun control law in the last year. Many of the large urban areas in our nation (but not all) support the gun control movement. I see no problem with trying to pass strong pass gun control at the state level except that it may run afoul of the Supreme Court and be overturned.

I don't see much hope of another assault weapons ban passing at the national level. As I stated above the gun control movement and the media is unable to even get all the Senate Democrats to back the AWB. Fifteen Democratic Senators or 28% refused to vote for it. Like it or not many Democrats do not support gun bans.

Of course the gun control movement can continue to push for gun bans and hope and pray that by some miracle one will pass. As I stated above, I feel this is a noble but futile effort.

Sadly I fear nothing much will change in the next few years on the gun control issue. Perhaps it is time for the gun control movement to consider a less draconian approach. A little success is worth a lot more than a dismal failure.