It’s time for commonsense talk about guns

We will spare you all the cloying words about thoughts and prayers. We’ve done that before. After Sandy Hook. And after Parkland. Last week it was Santa Fe, Texas.

Once again, guns in the hands of a troubled young man.

The result? Ten people killed inside a high school near Houston. Another 10 wounded.

After a student went on a rampage inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., young people rose up and demanded changes in the nation’s gun laws.

They had watched 17 of their friends, classmates and teachers slaughtered. They marched on Washington, D.C., and their state capital in Tallahassee. They received an audience with President Trump. They sparked a national movement marked by student walkouts; young people right here in southeastern Pennsylvania took part. They descended en masse on the nation’s capital, all in the name of commonsense changes in the nation’s gun laws.

They actually had some success in Florida, with the Legislature approving a boost in the minimum age to buy a rifle from 18 to 21 and enacting a mandatory three-day waiting period for any gun purchase.

Oddly enough, one state that did not seem swept up in the movement to take a long, hard look at our gun laws in the wake of the Parkland shooting was Texas. That should not necessarily come as a surprise. The Lone Star State is one of the nation’s leading bastions of Second Amendment boosters, where more than 1 million residents are licensed to carry handguns.

After the slaughter of elementary students in Sandy Hook, Conn., Texas actually expanded gun rights, making it easier and cheaper to get gun licenses and allowing handguns into college classrooms.

When a gunman armed with an assault rifle invaded a church in tiny Sutherland Springs, Texas, last November, killing more than two dozen worshippers, there were calls for more guns in churches.

Likewise, after the Santa Fe rampage, the state’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, an ardent gun rights supporter, talked about a way to “harden” schools and makes campuses safer.

He did offer one other bit of advice that is certainly applicable in this instance. He said adults who own guns must be the first line of defense by making sure they are locked away in a safe place, inaccessible to others, including children.

The teen who strode into the local high school and opened fire did so with a handgun and rifle that belonged to his father and were in the family’s house.

Elsewhere there were signs that this latest school tragedy may be changing some minds in Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott, another staunch gun rights advocate, said he will start holding “round table” discussions on guns and school safety issues this week.

“We need to do more than just pray for the victims and their families,” Abbott said. “It’s time in Texas that we take action to step up and make sure that this tragedy is never repeated again.”

Let’s start with this premise: The Second Amendment is not going away. Nor should it.

But even the pre-eminent conservative voice, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, suggested that right was not absolute.

We debate the Second Amendment, what it meant when it was written by the founding fathers, and what it means today, when killing machines capable of raining death could not have been dreamed up even in their wildest dreams by those who decreed the Bill of Rights.

Today’s weapons are not exactly the single-fire muskets in fashion at the time when it was deemed that a “well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Those words are guaranteed under the Constitution.

Finally, there are the words noted in the Declaration of Independence, that we are “endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We would suggest that includes sending your children off to school in the morning relatively assured they will return home safely that night, not snuffed out by another troubled person armed to the teeth.

It’s time we talk about these intertwining issues and find a solution before we offer one more thought or prayer.