Guns designed to kill humans should not be in the hands of ordinary citizens. I’d rather they weren’t in the hands of police or the military, but that would be a different world altogether.

I’m confident that the intention of the Second Amendment is not  to arm citizens for the purpose of killing fellow citizens, but that is basically the argument we’ve been hearing from “guns everywhere” advocates.

The private ownership of handguns and assault rifles — weapons designed and created almost  exclusively to kill human beings — should be illegal. To remove the tens of millions of such guns already circulating in society, we should establish an aggressive buy-back program. If we have to sweeten the deal, every illegal weapon thus returned would be replaced with a sporting weapon — a rifle or shotgun.

I leave it to others to critique the arguments about training and freedom — my space is limited here. I would only point out that comparing handgun prohibition to the prohibition of prostitution and intoxicants is an attempt to compare an urge that few people act on to urges that virtually everyone acts on.

We can debate, I suppose, whether sex and intoxication are wrong, but I think most of us agree that killing humans is almost always wrong.

So, let’s get the means to do so out of the hands of ordinary citizens.