Following is an LTE, addressing the opinion of a regular contributor that gun control doesn't work, what's needed is better mental health care, yadda:
I’m afraid I can’t buy ___'s argument that gun control doesn’t, and can’t, work. Intelligently crafted legislation could, and would, gradually diminish the availability of firearms and, thus, the number of firearm-related crimes, as it has in Australia, the UK, Switzerland, and a few other garden spots. The problem is that we are not capable, at present, of intelligently crafted legislation, not least because rather more than half our legislators at the federal level either are not intelligent, or are incapable of going against the arms industry and the small minority of gun owners who don’t realize that Wayne LaPierre is completely nuts.
So I’ll go ahead and grant him the vanishingly small likelihood that we’ll have effective regulation in the foreseeable future, and hop aboard the call for greater mental health screening and therapy. I will start with the suggestion that one rather obvious sign of mental ill-health is the perceived need to own firearms that are expressly designed for, and only for, exterminating large numbers of human beings. It has a nice Catch-22 touch to it: if you think you need a Bushmaster, or a Barrett, or a Saiga, or any of the plethora of high-capacity high-powered semi-auto or auto WMD out there, you clearly shouldn’t be licensed to own one and probably are a candidate for some high-intensity shrinkage, if not a built-to-suit rubber room.
And, yes, I’m a gun-owner, licensed to carry.