"Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited." — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Heller vs. D.C. (2008)

The election of Donald Trump has given this country an unexpected opportunity — some breathing room to talk about gun violence without anyone fearing that Congress might delete the Second Amendment or the White House could send troops to the door to confiscate our rifles.

That was never in the cards, but with Republicans calling the shots in every corner of Washington, all of America can be assured that it's simply not going to happen.

That's great news, because, America, we have our work cut out for us.

Every 15 minutes in the United States a new grave is readied for a fresh victim of gun violence. Between brushing our teeth before bed and brushing them after breakfast, roughly two dozen more people have died of gunshots.

Seven days a week. Young, old, middle-aged. Healthy and sick and rich and poor. Criminals. Police. Suspects. Toddlers. Siblings playing. Men, women and teens committing suicide.

That averages to 92 people each day, felled by bullets or shells, or more than 33,000 per year. No other developed nation has numbers like this, and across the globe only in the most chaotic and violent places on earth do more people die of gun wounds each year. Even adjusted for population size, guns are astoundingly more likely to be the cause of death here than elsewhere.

Six out of 10 times, a gun is behind a given homicide. When it comes to suicide, attempts made with guns were far more likely to succeed. As a result, more Americans shoot themselves to death — 21,175 in 2013 — than anywhere else on the planet.

America, isn't it time, finally, to talk about those numbers?

This dialogue about death is long overdue. And yet it's no secret why we've been unable to have it.

Every time a new headline shouts the awful news of another massacre, or introduces one more grim litany of annual stats, liberals shout for new controls on guns, sometimes acting as if the Second Amendment doesn't exist.

And conservatives? They tend to wave the same amendment like a battle flag, digging in their heels around an absolutist view of gun rights in this country that is dangerous, disingenuous and relatively recent.

Not all gun control proposals are bad, and not all are good. Some make more sense than others, and it's time to at least start talking about which is which. We can't do that if tragedy leads to showdown rather than a sit-down.

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Talking about gun laws has become increasingly difficult since 2008, when a sharply divided Supreme Court ruled that individuals' right to own guns is protected by the Bill of Rights. The late Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion upended nearly 200 years of precedent and declared some gun restrictions are simply too restrictive to be legal.

The Dallas Morning News applauded that ruling. Finally, the court spelled out exactly what the Second Amendment means, we wrote. In an editorial headlined: "Court Gets This Right: Individuals can own guns, state can regulate," we concluded that "what this ruling finally gives us is a sensible benchmark from which to argue."

But what we didn't foresee was the way the ruling would be used to corral Congress and mostly conservative politicians into a cone of silence when it comes to discussing gun laws, no matter how minor or how sensible.

Scalia's sweeping opinion had capped a decades-long effort by lawyers and activists to change the legal and political framework of gun rights in America. That fight, led since 1977 by a far more politicized National Rifle Association, had pushed members of Congress, presidential candidates and various U.S. attorneys general to insist that the Second Amendment be read as an absolute bar on gun restrictions.

The change was chronicled in the evolving national platforms of the Republican Party. In 1972, it called for limited gun control only. By 1980, the platform was explicitly calling for the repeal of large parts of the Gun Control Act of 1968.

In 1975, the NRA took two full pages in its house magazine, The American Rifleman, to defend itself against charges that it routinely fights all gun legislation. It argued persuasively that it had often supported restrictions in the past. But soon after, more zealous members seized control of the NRA, and by 1977 it had begun exhorting members of Congress and others to adopt an absolutist view of the Second Amendment.

It faced setbacks along the way. President Ronald Reagan disregarded pressure from the NRA and supported a mandatory waiting period. In 1991, former Chief Justice Warren Burger, one of the century's leading conservatives, called the effort to paint the Second Amendment in such uncompromising terms "a fraud." Under President Bill Clinton, a Democratic Congress passed the Brady Bill, which banned assault-style rifles and extended the Reagan-era waiting period.

By 2008, when Scalia read his landmark Heller decision, gun rights had already begun to be baked into the political DNA of grass-roots Republicans. The rise of the tea party two years later only solidified this uncompromising stance.

Here's where we are today: In the closing days of the 2016 presidential election, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre posted an urgent warning on social media: "There is no red line that President Hillary Clinton will not cross when it comes to attacking your rights and forcefully taking your guns and she dreams of twisting a knife in the heart of the one freedom that separates our nation from the rest of the world."

No wonder we can't talk about gun deaths in America. A never-ending clamor over the Second Amendment has cast a deadly quiet over all talk of reforms that might make America and its gun owners safer. It's a quiet we can no longer afford to permit.

Guns by themselves are not our chief problem, America. It's true that there are more firearms in private hands here than in the next 18 most gun-loving countries in the world. We have more than one gun for every one of our 300 million-plus residents.

It's the killing that has to stop. The accidents. The homicides. The murders. The suicides. We need a conversation because we need to start addressing the rising death toll in a way that we have not been able to ever since the absolutism over the Second Amendment has stopped our efforts cold.

America has seldom been so repulsed, so outraged, so heartsick. And yet, the Second Amendment absolutism prevented a single reform from passing Congress.

Every time a new tragedy strikes, a strange kind of silence forms around any talk of reform, no matter how small the proposal or how sensible.

How else to explain the inability to discuss changes in gun laws after the obviously ill Adam Lanza carried his mother's guns into Sandy Hook Elementary School and turned the lights out on 20 beautiful, tiny students?

America has seldom been so repulsed, so outraged, so heartsick. And yet, the Second Amendment absolutism prevented a single reform from passing Congress. We were barely able to even have a discussion about what changes might make children like those who died in Sandy Hook safer in the future.

Whether it's a mass shooting like in Orlando, or a tragic accident in your neighbor's backyard, we've got to be able to talk about how to prevent such deaths. And to do it without the instant and ungrounded charge that such talk presents a clear and present danger to the Second Amendment.

What's wrong is this idea that the Second Amendment is so sacrosanct that no restriction on gun rights can be tolerated. America has argued for generations about what kinds of speech can be limited, what sorts of police searches are reasonable, and what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Discussions about what the right to keep and bear arms means in a modern context will and should continue for years to come.

We understand that gun control isn't popular in Texas. But nationwide, only 11 percent of Americans say they think gun laws should be relaxed. Five times that many say the laws should be strengthened. More than 1 in 3 gun owners shared that view.

When asked, large majorities of Americans favor more thorough background checks. Americans are more closely divided over whether to renew the ban on assault rifles. Few support any kind of blanket ban on handguns.

This confirms that there should be plenty to talk about. But any discussion is met by a too-common refrain: They're coming for our guns.

But who, really, is coming? No serious politician is calling for widespread confiscation of firearms, let alone "the government" writ large. And it sure as sunshine isn't this newspaper.

Surely, different sides in this debate should be able to discuss these issues without demonizing one another.

We believe in the Constitution and its Second Amendment. We have long championed the Second Amendment and gun rights. We understand the passion for guns — for hunting, target practice, self-defense. We respect the views of Texans who believe no further gun control is wise. But surely, different sides in this debate should be able to discuss these issues without demonizing one another.

Besides, even as he penned the landmark decision in Heller, Scalia had in mind precisely the kinds of conversations we are calling for. "Nothing in our opinion," he wrote, "should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."

So, yes, some laws are too restrictive. But not all laws.

It's our job, all of ours, to launch those conversations to start testing which proposals make sense, which will make us safer, and which might do more harm than good.

But to get started, we're going to have to start talking, and stop hiding behind a Second Amendment absolutism that has kept us quiet for too long.