An email with minor edits:

Your piece on gun control in today’s Wash Post was excellent. Thank you. That said, I have a few comments on it. You say that “No country has ever banned or confiscated guns ‘when they were that prevalent…'”. But I ask, is there any country on earth where the civilian population keeps and bears more arms than the U.S.? I doubt it.

Also, not long ago in response to a mass shooting Australia seized or bought back some 650,000 firearms and the deaths from shootings plummeted. (Google: Australia, gun seizures). Isn’t there a lesson we could learn from Down Under?

Also, I personally feel that Hollywood and the entire video empire bears much responsibility for gun violence. Kids today grow up on a steady diet of on-screen blood, gore, and mayhem. Hardly surprising that some of them grow up thinking that such slaughter is just business as usual in America.

Many thanks for the kind words and the feedback. Estimates of how many guns Americans own vary widely, but there is general agreement that there are many more more guns per capita in the U.S. than in the rest of the world. That’s my point: It’s why looking at other countries’ rates and policies has limited relevance to our own. Confiscating 650,000 guns is a very different enterprise than confiscating hundreds of millions of them would be. (Here, by the way, are two studies, the merits of which I cannot judge, suggesting Australia’s gun control has not been successful.)

I am sympathetic to your point about entertainment — changing what we imagine has to change what we feel can be done — but we had a nice long run of declining homicide rates without, I think, our entertainment becoming more peaceful.