A lot of Americans die from guns every year. More than 30 thousand. That should horrify us all.

 

To start to make things better we need to stop making things worse. If Congress wants to give criminals silencers and armor piercing bullets, well that’s going to makes things worse. And the Republican Congress is looking at (and pushing for) those measures right now.

 

There’s no need for either of those things and many police chiefs have already made it clear that both measures put their officers in more danger. An insane proposition. Call me crazy, but I want our police to be safe.

 

So what new legislation and issues would I like to talk about? Some basic common sense:

 

Background Checks on Every Gun Purchase

 

Every gun purchase. This should be a no-brainer. Background checks happen with job interviews and loan applications. We can widen them to all gun purchases as well.

 

No Gun Show Loopholes

 

Direct sale loopholes are insanity. They’re predicated on the idea that an individual can sell their personal property without being considered a dealer or a private business. And that makes sense when you’re selling a couch or your father’s Match Box cars on Craigslist. It doesn’t make sense for guns. Because guns are dangerous. Restrict gun sales and purchases to dealers exclusively. It’s not difficult. We keep people from selling other things. Open a package of granola bars and you’ll see right on the side of the wrapper, “Not for individual resale.”

 

Gun Owner Database

 

Let’s talk about the pros and cons of a publicly available database for gun owners. Tracking all guns being sold and to whom they’re registered gives people the opportunity to move to less gun-populated neighborhoods, or be aware that they’re close to an armory.

 

 

Add Title II Weapons

 

Title II is a classification of highly dangerous weapons that require extra clearance for purchase. Automatic weapons and grenades are currently on the list. But many semi-automatic weapons, and semi-automatic modifications, should be added.

 

Safety Mechanisms

 

Why don’t we investigate safety mechanisms like finger print authorization? If our cell phones can scan before unlocking, certainly our guns can too. Thousands of gun injuries are accidents. Requiring a finger print authorization for firing capability is an easy modification that would reduce hundreds, maybe thousands of deaths. A child who finds their parents’ gun is an unfathomable tragedy we continue to ignore.

 

Manufacturer Liability

 

I’d be remiss to not mention manufacturer liability. And the GOP should love it. We simply make civil accountability of gun manufacturers as free as their sales are. Let the free market decide.

 

Gun manufacturers need to be liable for their own products. Not simply in the event that they malfunction, but in the event that they are used exactly as they are designed to be used: To shoot another human being.

 

The argument gets made that cars kill people (and they do,) and that bricks can kill people (and they can), and if car manufacturers and masons crafted cars and bricks to better assault I’d be open to civil suits against them. But the fact remains that those are products with economic purposes wholly separate from violence. And in the instance of cars, they take great pains to make their products tragedy adverse. Handguns and weapons of assault however, are designed for the very tragedy we fear from them. 

 

And that’s an important distinction between hunting rifles and weapons. One is meant for shooting animals and one is meant for shooting people. When people die from that second one, holding the manufacturer accountable for the intended design of the product seems only logical.

 

Read the above ideas or come up with something better, either way we need to do something.

 

And it is worth remembering that gun deaths in America have gone down over the past two plus decades. They’ve followed the overall patterns of violent crimes (which peaked in the early 90s) but it’s not an insignificant thing to point out. They’re still outrageously high. Mass shootings have increased. We need to be smarter. People’s lives depend on it.

 

Over these last few decades the NRA has politicized any common sense approach for the benefit of the gun manufacturers. The only way we return a safe approach to the people is by talking openly with the people.

 

And within the context of recent horrific tragedies, I’ll reiterate that we don’t know all the details surrounding what happened in Las Vegas and Orlando. We don’t know that any guardrails would have changed the horrifying outcome. We’re only left with the aftermath and the knowledge that we need to talk about this.

 

We can’t keep doing nothing. Let’s do something.