We don't need a conversation, national, or otherwise, on what to do about gun control.

There are quite a few difficult and complex issues that confront legislators and policymakers -- how to deal with Syria, how to fix the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the need to avert the fiscal cliff -- but what to do about guns isn't one of them.

What we know from every available study on the correlation between guns and mayhem, most especially Professor David Hemenway's recent book, "Private Guns, Public Health," is that more guns equal more homicides as well as suicides by gun, and accidental deaths from guns.

It seems like simple logic to conclude that in a society in which about 35 percent of American households have guns, there would be many more deaths from guns than there are in societies that have effective gun control.

In this country in the years 2008 and 2009, 5,740 children and teens died from gunfire.

In countries where guns are difficult to obtain, like Scotland and Canada, children rarely die of gunshots.

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Hemenway writes that "in general, guns don't induce people to commit crimes. What guns do is make crimes lethal."

He adds that they also make suicide attempts lethal: About 60 percent of suicides in America involve guns.

"If you try to kill yourself with drugs, there's a 2 to 3% chance of dying. With guns, the chance is 90%," he wrote.

In every other industrialized country that has experienced a gun massacre, the tragedy was followed by the enactment and enforcement of stringent gun control laws.

In this country, the National Rifle Association sees to it that nothing even close to protecting the general public is enacted.

Instead, its leaders and its most rabid supporters come up with bizarre notions of adding even more guns to society as the antidote to killing with guns.

These ludicrous notions amount to little more than marking these people as accessories to murder, pure and simple.

There is also a current widespread notion that the idea that the Second Amendment guarantees individual possession of guns is a long-standing concept embedded in American law.

In reality, this idea is a relatively new and, according to most legal scholars, an off-the-wall right-wing reading of the amendment.

No less a conservative Republican than the former United States Supreme Court Chief Justice, Warren Burger, wrote in 1990:

"If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn't be any such thing as the Second Amendment ... This has been the subject of 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.

"The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies -- militias -- would be maintained for the defense of the state.


In the wake of the unspeakable Newtown tragedy, it's time to let life imitate art and for the president and Congress to shove aside the whack jobs like Wayne LaPierre and his NRA gun nuts and emulate the fictional president Andrew Shepherd in the film, "An American President," who announced at a press conference toward the end of the film that he was writing an anti-crime and violence prevention law "that makes sense.

"You cannot address crime prevention (and violence) without getting rid of assault weapons and handguns.

"I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I'm gonna convince Americans that I'm right, and I'm gonna get the guns."

For me, I'll settle for getting rid of the assault weapons and the magazines of bullets that enable madmen at movie theaters, shopping malls, elementary schools, and public political meetings to spray death continually and senselessly upon innocent men, women and children.

There are depraved people in countries other than America, but they are held in check wherever there is effective gun control.

We see that in this country as well.

States with strong gun laws have fewer gun murders and suicides and accidental killings than states without them.

No more talk. No more conversations. Let's do something real and permanent and good and memorable for those innocent babies of Newtown.

Stephan Lesher is a resident of Southbury.