Opinion | Why not treat guns as other countries have?

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We wipe our tears, shake our heads and attend vigils and funerals after another mass school shooting — this time in our beloved city of Minneapolis, in Annunciation School’s chapel.

We ask ourselves: Why have our elected representatives not banned weapons of war from our streets? Why do they ignore this problem, and try to hide behind the Second Amendment? The lethal weapons employed so successfully in mass shootings are not your family’s hunting guns used for sport, but rather weapons of war, and in particular, the AR-15, a weapon that is designed only to kill people. It is light, it is deadly, it is capable of rapid fire even though it is not fully automatic, and it is easy (though extremely illegal) to convert to fully automatic.

Congress passed a 10-year bipartisan ban on assault weapons in 1994, but failed to renew the ban when it expired in 2004. The ban prohibited the sale and manufacture of certain semiautomatic weapons and magazines that could hold more than 10 rounds. Data from the National Institutes of Health shows that the ban had a sizable impact on reducing the number of public mass shootings in the United States. We can and should ban these weapons of war again.

Other countries have had mass shootings, and they have responded to reduce their likelihood in the future.

Within two weeks of a 1996 mass shooting in Australia by a young man using an AR-15 rifle that killed 35 people and wounded 23, that country banned these weapons of war. The ban included a buyback scheme to compensate owners of the newly banned weapons, a centralized registry of gun owners and a public education campaign about the new laws. Millions of guns are still in private hands, but there have been just three mass shootings in the past 25 years.

In 1989, a 25-year-old man, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, killed 14 students and faculty at a school in Montreal, Canada. In response, Canada banned large-capacity magazines for automatic rifles. After another mass shooting in 2020, Canada banned 1,500 “assault style” weapons, including the AR-15 and Mini-14.

More examples exist. While other countries haven’t ended mass shootings, they have reformed their laws to turn these tragic events into rare events.

The Second Amendment does not prevent the government from regulating weapons of war. One of this commentary’s authors was a combat engineer who carried hand grenades, an M-16 and C-4 explosive on minesweeping missions in the jungles of Vietnam and whose night defensive positions included an M-60 machine gun and claymore anti-personnel mines. Every one of these lethal weapons to which he had access in that war is restricted here at home, except for the deadly semiautomatic civilian counterparts of the M-16, which in no way deserve to be singled for protection by the Second Amendment. The AR-15 and similar weapons of war are therefore outliers in our own regime of accepted weapons restrictions, and America’s madness itself is an outlier from other countries’ common sense.

That this month’s tragic murder of Charlie Kirk was done with a hunting rifle shows that restricting weapons of war is not the final answer in a country where gun violence has become an accepted way of life. But getting weapons of war off the street is at least a start to protecting our children and other victims of mass shooters.

Our children are suffering because of this. It’s time to end this American insanity about weapons of war, ban them from our streets and buy back those that are in circulation. Our country will be a much safer place for all of us if our elected officials have the courage to lead on this issue.