Cigarettes kill people.  Guns kill people. People kill people.

Gun violence is now the chief cause of children's death in America. Over 300,000 children's lives have been directly affected by gun violence since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012.  We have a serious mental health crisis on our hands.  I refer to all the gun fetishists who suffer from the delusion that owning one or more (mostly more) lethal weapons will somehow improve their lives.  They should immediately commit themselves for psychiatric care, and if they refuse, they should be involuntarily committed to keep themselves and  the rest of us safe.

A majority of Americans don't want to live in a society where anyone can kill anyone else at any time in any place for any reason or for no reason, without warning.  The majority wants reasonable gun control measures.  Democracy has taken a crazy turn when our legislators refuse to listen to the will of the majority of people.  The inmates are running the asylum.

What is our problem? The U.S. has done a pretty good job of de-sexifying cigarette smoking.  Movie stars mostly no longer smoke on screen, PSAs warn of the dangers of smoking, each package comes with a warning label from the Surgeon General.  Why can't we de-sexify gun ownership the same way ?  Get guns out of the hands of movie stars, limit playing time for shoot-em-up video games to less than 1 hr per week, introduce warning labels on shoot-em-up video games and guns, and crank up the PSAs on gun violence.  Not to mention, banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines and setting up universal background checks, and red flag laws.

The U.S. has the most guns, the most guns per capita, and the most gun-related violence of any "developed" country in the world. Check out some comparisons from the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations below.