Why the answer to America's gun problem lies due north

Emulate Canada?

Recreational shooting in Canada.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Andy Clark)

As we're once again trying to figure out what to do about our gun problem — the constant mass shootings, the 11,000 or so gun homicides every year — one of our biggest failures is one of imagination. We've gotten so used to the idea that American society is saturated with instruments designed to kill people that we find it tough to even figure out how we might alter our system of gun laws to make all those deaths less likely.

The result is that it gets treated as big news when the White House says the president might support an extremely modest gun measure that does little more than encourage government agencies to comply with existing reporting rules regarding the background check system. So it's time to think at a more fundamental level and examine the presumptions that undergird our system of gun laws. And one useful way to do so is to ask whether we might learn something from the Canadians.

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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.