One man's opinion (if wrong)

Fareed Zakaria has a opinion column in Time about gubs:

After the ghastly act of terrorism against a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on 5 August, Americans are pondering how to stop gun violence. We have decided that it is, in the words of New York Times columnist David Brooks, a problem of psychology, not sociology. We are trying to fathom the evil ideology of Wade Michael Page. Only several weeks ago, we were all trying to understand the twisted psychology of James Holmes, the man who killed twelve innocents at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Before that it was the mania of Jared Loughner, who shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords last year.
Certainly we should try to identify such people and help treat and track them. But aside from the immense difficulty of such a task-- there are millions of fanatical, crazy people, and very few turn into mass murderers-- it misses the real problem.
Gun violence in America is off the chart compared with every other country on the planet. The gun-homicide rate per capita in the US is thirty times that of Britain and Australia, ten times that of India, and four times that of Switzerland. When confronted with such a large deviation, a scholar would ask: Does America have some potential cause for this that is also off the chart? I doubt that anyone seriously thinks we have thirty times as many crazy people as Britain or Australia. But we do have many, many more guns.
There are 88.8 firearms per hundred people in the US. In second place is Yemen, with 54.8, then Switzerland with 45.7 ,and Finland with 45.3. No other country has a rate above forty. The U.S. handgun-ownership rate is seventy percent higher than that of the country with the next highest rate.
The effect of the increasing ease with which Americans can buy ever more deadly weapons is also obvious. Over the past few decades, crime has been declining, except in one category. In the decade since 2000, violent-crime rates have fallen by twenty percent, aggravated assault by 21%, motor-vehicle theft by 44.5% and nonfirearm homicides by 22%. But the number of firearm homicides is essentially unchanged. What can explain this anomaly, except easier access to guns?
Confronted with this blindingly obvious causal connection, otherwise intelligent people close their eyes. Denouncing any effort to control guns, George Will explained on ABC News that he had "a tragic view of life, which is that... however meticulously you draft whatever statute you wind up passing, the world is going to remain a broken place, and things like this are going to happen." I don't recall Will responding to, say, the 9/11 attacks, or any other law-and-order issue for that matter, with a "things happen" sentiment.
The other argument against any serious gun control is that it's unconstitutional, an attempt to undo American history. In fact, something close to the opposite is true. Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in the US from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man."
Congress passed the first set of federal laws regulating, licensing, and taxing guns in 1934. The act was challenged and went to the Supreme Court in 1939. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, said the Second Amendment grants people a right that "is not one which may be utilized for private purposes ,but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state." The court agreed unanimously.
Things started to change in the 1970s ,as various right-wing groups coalesced to challenge gun control, overturning laws in state legislatures, Congress, and the courts. But Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon, described the new interpretation of the Second Amendment in an interview after his tenure as "one of the greatest pieces of fraud— I repeat the word fraud— on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
So when people throw up their hands and say we can't do anything about guns, tell them they're being un-American and unintelligent.

Rico says it's pretty obvious which end of the political spectrum Zakaria is on... (And he undoubtedly hasn't had a family member robbed or raped, yet.)