This week a deranged young man walked into a church, sat in a folding chair, pulled out a gun and allegedly massacred nine people at a bible study. Two years ago, 12 people died in a mass shooting at a naval base in Washington, DC. Three years ago: Newtown, Oak Creek and Aurora. And in the meantime, tens of thousands of others were killed at the barrel of a gun.



It seems pretty clear that racism was at the heart of the heinous incident in Charleston. There is no place for such hatred in our society, and the degree of violence that this hatred can inspire is all the more distressing. But, at some point we also have to recognize that the common thread in all of these gun crimes is our attitude toward guns and our outdated gun laws. We must confront the reality that other developed nations don’t live with these horrors with such frequency. The United States has nearly four times more gun-related deaths per capita than the UK, Canada, and Japan combined.

Over the past few months, I’ve introduced three gun safety bills and fought for a proposal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to keep cop-killing bullets off the street.

The ATF’s proposal was shelved before its comment period even ended because of the uproar from the gun lobby and its allies in Congress, and my own proposals have triggered a wave of invectives and false attacks in an attempt to get me to back down and scare off others from supporting responsible gun safety reforms.

Earlier this month, I introduced a bill with Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) to invest $10m annually to help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research gun violence as a public health epidemic – a modest sum when we consider that gun violence is estimated to cost us over $229bn a year in medical care, the prosecution of assailants, lost wages, mental health treatment, and other long-term effects of gun violence. This small investment would help us understand and address this public health crisis.

I also introduced a bill to close the gun show loophole, because criminals have discovered that in many states guns can be bought without a background check at gun shows as long as the deal is deemed a private sale.

More recently, I introduced The Firearm Risk Protection Act to require gun owners to carry liability insurance – just as state laws require car owners to carry an insurance policy. If you want to buy that Uzi, the thinking goes, you should also have to pay for the risk that gun poses to society as a result.

I’m also planning on introducing a bill to make gun trafficking a federal crime and to stiffen penalties for straw purchasers. This bill would directly address concerns expressed by law enforcement officials like the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association and the Major Cities Chiefs Association, who have called for a dedicated firearms trafficking statute to help them combat the flow of thousands of firearms to violent criminals, international drug cartels, and a host of other dangerous people.

I’m doing this because more children die in the United States from bullets than from cancer, and it’s a scandal that the federal government hasn’t done more.

But instead of a reasoned and measured debate about how to reduce gun violence, the response has been an onslaught of gun-obsessed fanatics who strongly – and wrongly – believe that the second amendment guarantees unregulated access to anything that anyone might wish to add to their own personal arsenal. The armchair-constitutionalists among them can make the case against pretty much any regulation of guns, and the courts be dammed.

The only solution that National Rifle Association-bunch does have to our nation’s gun woes is more guns. It’s the philosophy that served the Wild West, but doesn’t make much sense in modern times.

We can and should get back to a serious discussion about how we eliminate the horrors of and needless loss of life from gun violence from our society. We can begin to prioritize the lives of the men, women, and children who will die at the barrel of a gun this year over the minor inconveniences that a minority of Americans might face from policies designed to end the bloodshed.

Those who support sensible solutions must start standing up to the gun bullies. We cannot back down from those who believe their inaccurate interpretation of the second amendment matters more than the hundreds of thousands of lives that will be lost if we do nothing.