Now is the time for gun reform legislation

It’s not often that The Lakeville Journal feels the need to return to what may be considered a national issue repeatedly in consecutive months. After all, readers get their national news elsewhere, and look to this publication for local news. But when it comes to gun reform, there cannot be too much said. Not when action still has not been taken by our political leaders, even after the mass shootings of August made it seem inevitable to some that action would be taken in September when Congress returned to its current session in Washington, D.C. 

And, when considering what has local meaning, let’s not forget that Newtown is about an hour’s drive from our readership area, with plenty of connections between the two places. And that our school children must go through the same anxiety-producing drills that others do across the country.

We last editorialized on gun reform in the Aug. 15 Lakeville Journal. The urgency for action has not changed. Below you will find the primary points made in August once again emphasized here. Be sure to read Carol Ascher’s column this week on gun reform as well.

Kudos to our Sen. Chris Murphy for his continued and relentless calls for approved legislation, and to all our representatives in Washington who are on the right side of history regarding this issue. 

But has our collective attention now been drawn to impeachment, whistleblowers, climate change? It seems that once the great eye of national interest has turned away from specific events, the news cycle moves so quickly and erratically that it becomes difficult to turn back. However important all these other issues are, though, and of course they are, turn back we must if we want to save our country from continued targeted and heinous violence.

What should be done, as noted here before, is that Congress should enact federal universal background checks, mental health screening and data recording, red flag laws, gun licensing, insurance requirements for gun owners, bans on assault weapons and limits on magazine sizes. 

It should be at least as challenging to apply to own a gun as it is, for instance, to apply for medical, home or auto insurance or a mortgage. If this country could find a way to prevent the use of airplanes as weapons by terrorists following 9/11, we should be able to find some solutions to out-of-control gun violence.

Connecticut Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal have been activists in the reform of federal gun legislation, and both have had bills pending in Congress: Murphy with the Background Check Expansion Act, and Blumenthal with an Emergency Risk Protection Order statute that he cosponsored with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. It is time for this issue to become solidly bipartisan, in that the vast majority of Americans who belong to either major party or are unaffiliated believe action must be taken by their leaders to address gun violence.  

Those who wave the Second Amendment in the faces of those who run the country (in all branches of government) need to look at history, and realize that the epidemic of gun violence has increased exponentially since the incremental changes in how the Second Amendment has been understood after the 1970s. Before, it was seen as applying to militias, not to personal ownership of guns (See “Politics Changed the Reading of the Second Amendment—and Can Change It Again,” by Jeffrey Toobin, Aug. 5, 2019, The New Yorker.) If those in any elected office now are unable to find the courage to act on legislation that will help, at the very least, to begin to stem the tide of gun violence, they should be voted out and replaced with Americans who take the mission of serving their country seriously.