It's Christmas Eve, babe....

As always, here's to avoiding the drunk tank--and drama in general--as you settle in to enjoy the holidays.

And since we're having this chat: Happy New Year, too!

Armed and dangerous

Let's see if this is possible. Let's see if I can write brief post about gun control that's actually brief.

It can be tough to sort through all the noise to get any signal on this issue. You have probably seen a lot of information thrown around since the San Bernardino shootings: That 2.5 million crimes are averted every year because of guns (laughable); that gun crime is way down since 1993 (true but misleading; the numbers have been same since 1998 or so); that a gun ban in Australia made a big impact in gun deaths there (complex, but probably accurate); and even that it's unthinkable to abridge a constitutional right (also laughably untrue--try buying an RPG or shouting "fire" in a crowded theater).

All of that obfuscates the one fact that is literally undeniable: Americans are killed by guns at an appalling rate. Way higher, UNBELIEVABLY higher, than peer nations... and even some third-world countries. To say this is untrue is to share a Venn diagram with moon landing hoax believers.

That's a problem. A public health problem, in that people are dying who shouldn't be. A human problem, in that sons, daughters, mothers, sons are being taken from their families. And even an economic problem, in that all that those people could contribute--from the big, like starting companies, to the small, like paying sales taxes--is obliterated forever.

Why are we so unwilling, as a country, to address it?

I think the biggest issue is that the problem seems more or less insurmountable now. Distractions like "let's fix mental illness!" ignore the glaringly obvious correlation between gun deaths and the number of guns. Yet no one is seriously proposing confiscating all guns. That's because it would be constitutionally questionable, at best, and also because there are so many guns. The NRA has spent the last 40 years  convincing America that we need more guns as "tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection." Tons of other Americans, including me, have paid money to shoot firearms for fun, or own them at home for the same reason. So the heavily armed horse is way, way out of the barn, and isn't coming back.

It's easy at this point in the conversation to just throw up your hands and say, "Screw it! Nothing can be done." But that's a pretty lame attitude. That's not how we cured smallpox, integrated schools or made cars safer.

So here are some things we could do:

-Require liability insurance. It has been proven with other crimes that making them just slightly less convenient (or harder) to commit deters them. If, as when you buy a car, you have to obtain insurance, that will dent sales. It will also theoretically create economic incentives for insurance companies to find ways to make guns safer, for instance by funding more advanced smart gun systems.

-Mandate a much longer waiting period for buying a gun. Include an onerous background check. Training. The result is fewer gun sales, and guns in the hands of theoretically more stable, responsible owners.

-Make concealed carry illegal. This is probably the most controversial idea. But if we're serious about stopping mass shootings, we should understand that "good guys with guns" are unlikely to prevent such carnage. And worse, they present a complication to responding officers, who must now sort out who are the good shooters and who are the bad shooters before reacting. (Note that this is why, in the Oregon campus shooting, an actual armed student kept his gun holstered.) The U.S. is a modern nation, not Somalia, and if you feel scared enough to arm yourself for everyday life--and you're not in the military or in law enforcement--I would suggest that your money would be better spent on counseling.

-And this seems like the least-controversial idea anyone could suggest: Allow the CDC to study gun violence unfettered. Since 1996, the agency hasn't been able to examine gun violence with any kind of rigor. (Thanks, NRA!) Getting good, unbiased data on gun violence is the first step toward addressing it like the public health and safety issue it is.

The auto industry is a great example of how safety has been regulated into both the product and the user. It would be fantastic to see the same type of results with guns:

But nothing will change if we continue to just shrug our shoulders and complain that it's too big of a problem or too big of a burden on gun owners. Nothing resembling those two obstacles have stood in politicians' way as they happily tried to legislate  solutions to--just pulling an issue out of thin air here--terrorism. Terrorism, yes, which has killed exponentially fewer Americans since 2001 than gun violence. And no amount of gut-churning violence seems to be weighty enough to act as an inflection point. You would think the massacre of a bunch of children by a guy using legal firearms would have given us a push in the right direction. But that was years ago, and here we are again.

Like an addiction, the first step is admitting we have a problem. Denying it will just land us right back in the same bloody mess.

And so maybe the next post I write on the subject will actually be short. Maybe even just one word: "Finally!"