Great article David, and you’re so right. We can control this gun mania while still allowing gun ownership. Japan has stringent gun background checks, much more stringent than ours, and people in Japan need to get their gun permits renewed every 3 years. We should carry out extensive background checks even if it means violating some privacy rights.

We need to know which men under 25 years old are on psychotropic drugs and we need to know if they have made threats on social media. Records of juvenile offenders that have been expunged as they’ve gotten older should be available, too. A fourteen year old who threatened to carry out a mass murder should not have those threats erased from a juvenile record when it comes to buying guns. Teachers and administrators should be allowed to expel threatening students, and schools should be warned when those students are returning.

Would these things be clamping down on personal freedoms? Of course, to an extent, but we have to look at these more extreme measures because the violence has gotten extreme. Why does the average American need access to guns that can shoot off enough rounds in a minute to kill 22 people?