Two more thoughts about gun control: one practical and immediate, the other more abstract and academic, though with a practical fork in its tail. The practical comes from a recent discussion with my father, about, of all things, shooting raccoons. The Gopnik family seat, such as it is, is nowhere near Manhattan, Upper West or East Side, but rather a farm in remote rural Ontario, where my parents live surrounded by crops, animals, and pests—and indeed by farmers who need and use rifles. When I was talking to my father there last weekend, we discussed a recent raccoon infestation, and how he had called on a neighbor with a rifle to hightail it over to shoot the five unfortunate masked marauders beneath the back porch. (My dad buried them afterward, further proof that English professors can be eminently practical people.) My dad is actually a pretty good shot, and could have done it himself—but he had not finished the paperwork for his gun.

What onerous tasks are involved in getting a gun for the necessary work of rural life in Canada? Well, you have to do that paperwork, fill out an application for a license, take a gun-safety course, and then you have your raccoon-shootin’ rifle for the grim work of keeping off pests. (There are some other “controls”; if you have a longstanding dispute, for instance, your spouse is informed.) Does anything in this interfere with the liberty of the individual or the exigencies of rural life? No one disputes that there are sane reasons for ordinary people to need a rifle. But there is no imaginable, meaningful sense in which Canadians, or Australians, are “less free” when it comes to guns because they have to take a safety course before they use one. People who really need guns—and many, my folks among them, do—can get them and use them safely, while there are hedgerows, so to speak, against impulsive purchases or unsafe or frankly homicidal use.

What we can learn from Canada is how to legislate common sense without violating anyone’s liberty—unless you imagine that anyone’s liberty depends on having as many weapons as he wants whenever he wants them. Perhaps no existing gun law could have been explicitly designed to stop the shotgun killer of the Navy Yard. But to repeat the central truth of modern criminology: building low barriers against violent crime has a disproportionate effect in ending it. Make something difficult and you begin to make it impossible. You don’t have to back-engineer every law to cover every past criminal circumstance; you just have to sensibly craft laws to discourage the next one.

While in Canada, I also had a chance to read a helpful new academic book about gun control farther south, “Reducing Gun Violence in America,” which I urge on all who want to catch up on the scientific news on the subject. (Though the gun lobby will find its subtitle—“Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis”—utterly alarming.) The book, just out from the Johns Hopkins University Press, is an anthology of studies, condensing and summarizing the actual state of our knowledge about the subject of gun violence in this country—what real, tested social science shows, not the “three million marauders have been stopped just by the sight of my revolver!” anecdotes. It also makes some simple recommendations.

In particular, there are four ideas agreed to by all the academic researchers involved in the project. First, fix the background-check system by doing small things such as giving the F.B.I. ten days, instead of three, to complete them; prohibiting “high-risk” individuals from getting their hands on guns (anyone with a restraining order filed against him for a threat of violence, for example); and accelerating federal legislation to keep the violent and mentally ill from having guns. Second, make the A.T.F. more effective through such simple measures as getting the agency a director. Third, encourage research on “personalized” guns and gun triggers. Fourth, ban assault weapons, carefully defined, and with them magazines that fire more than ten rounds. And finally—radical idea—fund research on what actually works to end gun violence.

None of these things may pass Congress next week, or even next year, nor are they even remotely “Canadian” in impact—but they define a common-sense agenda whose promotion will, at a minimum, once again expose the irrational savagery of the gun lobby. “Reducing Gun Violence in America” also provides Mayor Bloomberg, who wrote the foreword, a chance to lay out four things that the President could do on his own, even in the face of our fanatic Congress. They are, in order, to appoint that A.T.F. director at last; order every federal agency to submit the relevant data on gun violence to the national background-check database (“Every missing record is a potential murder in the making”); have the Justice Department prosecute criminals who lie during background checks (seventy-six thousand such cases were referred to the D.O.J. by the F.B.I. in 2010, but fewer than four dozen prosecuted); and to stop supporting the “Tiahrt order,” which, unbelievably, prevents the A.T.F. even from releasing information about gun traffickers and how they operate. (More broadly, the good departing Mayor suggests that the whole mechanism by which Congress actively prohibits scientific research on gun violence could be short-circuited by a determined President.) These seem like minimal acts—little more than gestures, perhaps—but eminently doable and even politically practical. What are the President’s opponents going to do? Hate him more?

Justice Stevens, in his eloquent, essential dissent in the Supreme Court’s “Heller” case, shows that the history of the Second Amendment “makes abundantly clear that the Amendment should not be interpreted as limiting the authority of Congress to regulate the use or possession of firearms for purely civilian purposes.” In other words, no form of gun control like those proposed by the Johns Hopkins authors is even remotely in violation of the Constitution properly understood. But Stevens was on the losing side; Heller, decided in 2008, affirmed our embrace of gun madness, by a vote of 5–4. There was once a time when the Supreme Court sought to decide hard cases only with strong majorities. These days, with a highly politicized Court, huge decisions—who will be President? Can a health-care law, duly passed by Congress, survive Justice Scalia’s hatred of broccoli?—are routinely determined on 5–4 votes. To restore some balance to gun laws in America might require a fifth Justice who, like Justice Stevens, can read and reason. Meanwhile, a thousand smaller sanities may save the day, or at least a few lives.

Photograph by Mark Ovaska/Redux.