Common sense gun laws in the U.S. are an oxymoron, and the only true way to tackle gun control is to repeal the Second Amendment, conservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote in The New York Times.
"Gun ownership should never be outlawed, just as it isn't outlawed in Britain or Australia. But it doesn't need a blanket Constitutional protection, either," Stephens wrote.
Statistics don't lie about the real gun story in this country, but politicians do.
More guns mean "more murder" and "less safety," Stephens writes, stats that put a wrinkle in the protestations of conservatives.
Liberals "argue their case badly and in bad faith" and pay nothing more than "lip service" to gun control while they spout "endless liberal errors of fact," Stephens says.
The only solution — repeal it.
"The more closely one looks at what passes for 'common sense' gun laws, the more feckless they appear," Stephens writes. "Americans who claim to be outraged by gun crimes should want to do something more than tinker at the margins of a legal regime that most of the developed world rightly considers nuts. They should want to change it fundamentally and permanently.
"The 46,445 murder victims killed by gunfire in the United States between 2012 and 2016 didn't need to perish so that gun enthusiasts can go on fantasizing that 'Red Dawn' is the fate that soon awaits us," Stephens writes.
Stephens ends by anticipating blowback from conservatives about James Madison's position in the Federalist Papers.
"I wonder what Madison would have to say about that today, when more than twice as many Americans perished last year at the hands of their fellows as died in battle during the entire Revolutionary War.
"My guess: Take the guns — or at least the presumptive right to them — away. The true foundation of American exceptionalism should be our capacity for moral and constitutional renewal, not our instinct for self-destruction," Stephens concludes.
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