I've never owned a gun; I've never fired one. I've little interest in weaponry. My twenty-three-year-old son, on the other hand, is a champion marksman who has owned his gun, an FNP-45, for years. He's a wise, sober gun owner; he faithfully cares for it and for his safety, ours, and his friends'. He's thoroughly uninterested in owning an assault weapon and he seems satisfied with his one pistol. He and I largely agree as to what firearms laws ought to look like.
We've had a lively, ongoing dialogue about scores of personal, political, economic, and cultural issues attendant to firearms ownership. This week we'll discuss a map from a recent 'Washington Post column' by Ezra Klein. The map correlates the number of firearm deaths to gun-control restrictions, state-by-state. It's clear-as-a-bell that more guns in the hands of citizens do not, contrary to well-crafted lobby-and corporate-inspired myth, create safer environments.
The fact is the more guns held by a state's private citizens, the fewer regulations designed to protect children, the more gun-related deaths your state has. Louisiana, for example, has many more firearms-related deaths than other states, per capita, and it has among the loosest of our states' gun codes.
I would never support restrictions that would deny my son the joy marksmanship brings him and the skills he increasingly hones. Yet he and I are clear: there's a sickening chasm between his joy and his skill and the suffering loosed on our population by loose regulation.
He and I agree that the law must now, and for good, address that awful chasm.
-- map from statehealthfacts.org.