Asking parents to be responsible not enough

Milan Simonich’s column (“More gun laws won’t make streets or stores safer,” Ringside Seat, Aug. 7), leaves me despairing and infuriated. Surely he knows better.

Recent news reports show that states with stricter gun laws have fewer massacres and that the mentally ill are no more inclined than the rest of us to murder. We have known for a while households with guns have more homicides, suicides and gun accidents than households without guns. “Live by the sword; die by the sword?”

Australia had its last gun massacre in 1996 because it instituted stronger gun laws. One requires that a person asking for a gun license bring someone along to vouch for them — an idea stronger than a red-flag law.

And Dayton, Ohio? Without an assault weapon intended for

military carnage, would nine be dead and 27 injured in under 30 seconds? Asking parents to be responsible is not nearly enough. We must try gun-safety measures working in other places to end the unthinkable massacres of first graders, Amish children, high schoolers and so many more. And we could lower New Mexico’s high homicide rate, which until this legislative year, “benefited” from an absence of gun laws.

We must put public safety alongside a latter-day reinterpretation of the Second Amendment. Thanks to the governor and New Mexico House Speaker Brian Egolf for responding to the urgency of this dilemma. I wish that Simonich would get up to date on what current gun studies tell us.