We need lawmakers to enact the people's will on gun control
Just two weeks ago, a gunman entered a school in Georgia with an AK-47 and began shooting. An Australian baseball player was senselessly murdered in Oklahoma City. Elementary schools in Colorado hold drills where five-year-old kids hunker down behind tables while an "active shooter" knocks at the door. Just this week, Colorado voters ejected in recall elections two state senators who had sponsored new gun control laws in the wake of the Aurora cinema mass shooting. And the grim parade of gun violence in our cities marches on.
This madness must end – and it will when Congress stops ignoring the will of the American people and makes our nation and the entire world safer by passing common-sense and constitutional gun safety measures. The vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, agree on what needs to be done to cure our gun violence epidemic, which will not only save lives, but spare America from embarrassment in the world.
Australia's former deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer, said last Friday: "They cannot expect not to have any criticism of it worldwide … I am angry because it is corrupting the world, this gun culture of the United States." Indeed,the US has six times the gun death rate of other first world countries. This is not the America our founding fathers envisioned.
At our nation's birth on 4 July 1776, our founding fathers endowed Americans with "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". Those overarching rights are being eroded by the proliferation of gun violence.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/11/lawmakers-enact-gun-control