I don't like to Nick Kristof's columns a lot; perhaps in part because they're often so "earnest," almost like Mark Twain's "Good Little Boy" had grown up and ... become an earnest, Oregon-rooted liberal.
But, in the wake of the Loughner shooting, he tackles gun issues and offers some good insights.
On Australia, let's first prefix this by saying most Americans probably look at much of Oz as being kind of like Texas, but with Austin's social liberalism mixing throughout the nation at the same time as the rugged individualist mythos (not counting Aussie national health care) of the rest of Texas.
Well, in 1996, Australia banned assault weapons, Kristof notes. It was controversial indeed at the time, but it cut the firearm homicide rate in half.
Short of that, he gets some other ideas:
I asked Professor (David) Hemenway how he would oversee a public health approach to reducing gun deaths and injuries. He suggested:
• Limit gun purchases to one per month per person, to reduce gun trafficking. And just as the government has cracked down on retailers who sell cigarettes to minors, get tough on gun dealers who sell to traffickers.
• Push for more gun safes, and make serial numbers harder to erase.
• Improve background checks and follow Canada in requiring a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun. And ban oversize magazines, such as the 33-bullet magazine allegedly used in Tucson. If the shooter had had to reload after firing 10 bullets, he might have been tackled earlier. And invest in new technologies such as “smart guns,” which can be fired only when near a separate wristband or after a fingerprint scan.
The first and last would be easier to implement than the gun safes or other issues. A 28-day waiting period would get many up in arms. The one gun a month? Do you really need to buy a gun more often than that, even if you're a collector? Maybe we could modify that, and allow m ore than one purchase a month, pending stiff surtaxes.
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