Say "gun safety laws," not "control"
by Susan C. Strong, Executive Director, The Metaphor Project, http://www.metaphorproject.org
Please avoid the word "control" in talking about this issue. Americans fear the idea of control. Instead, you can say "we need better gun safety laws to stop the mentally ill from easily getting guns." All of the shooters involved in gun massacres in our country have later been proven to be mentally ill in some form or other. Let's renew the assault weapons ban. Stop internet gun sales. Stop any form of gun purchase that doesn't include the ability and requirement to check the buyer's record. Develop a method by which we can track who sold what gun to whom. Moreover, we need reform of our laws dealing with mental illness. A primary step re gun massacres would be that if an individual receives a diagnosis of schizophrenia or other mental illness with known links to gun violence, his or her information goes into a database that gun sellers are required by law to check. That, combined with a record about who sold what to whom would make gun sellers liable for gun violence, and those steps would go a long way to help slow this fatal infection of our country's body politic.