Regulate Guns

I love Nicholas Kristof’s column today.  He compares the need for gun regulation to the need for regulation of cars.  Apparently, I’m not the only one to make that analogy.  Here’s a bit of what he says:

If we had the same auto fatality rate today that we had in 1921, by my calculations we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually in vehicle accidents….

That question is a reflection of our national blind spot about guns. The truth is that we regulate cars quite intelligently, instituting evidence-based measures to reduce fatalities. Yet the gun lobby is too strong, or our politicians too craven, to do the same for guns. So guns and cars now each kill more than 30,000 in America every year.

It’s an interesting comparison.  Kristof shows that historically, cars have acquired more and more safety regulations; guns have acquired fewer and fewer.  Something is wrong here.