Other potential practical ideas that come to mind with guns - let's give another shot at solving it technologically. Yes, I know earlier attempts at a "smart gun" were a disaster. But if I can open my phone almost instantly with my fingerprint, surely we can figure out something for a gun, right? I mean, I know it doesn't solve every problem, but it might slow the sale of illegal guns. The paranoid right will probably worry about registering fingerprints in a federal database, so make it like Apple is doing and have the gun companies hold on to that data themselves. I'll have to do some research into what could possibly be done to make guns safer.
I thought a lot about the "emotion" angle last night, and it occurs to me that you can't really separate emotion from these types of debates entirely, and you probably don't want to. I mean, most people who have had a gun related death in their friend or family circle tend to gravitate toward gun control. Many of these people become activists. Those who have been able to save family members or themselves from assault would naturally be anti-gun control. It just makes sense to integrate what you know into these debates. Most people really don't pick a side out of thin air, debate it analytically and come up with an answer. They start from a certain emotional place and then find rationales to back up their experience. When you are saying that people need to pull back and look at the facts, you are never going to get anywhere, because you invalidating peoples strong emotions about the experiences guns have in their lives. It matters.