I’m sure there are some things that gun enthusiasts and I could agree on: our mutual respect for the Constitution, for example. But to my ear, the arguments in favor of the American gun-sale pandemic are way too short on self-evident truths and the pursuit of happiness.

To the framers of the Second Amendment, a firearm was a musket. They knew nothing about modern repeating rifles and fat ammunition clips. If they had, they’d have included limiting clauses in the amendment to protect us from the civilian-wrought gun carnage that we read about almost every day in the newspapers. Eventually, some future Congress will rewrite the Second Amendment to redress the absurdity that modern technology has made of it. Stricter background checks are not going to do the job. We’re going to have to find some other way to calm the frenetic gun commerce in our country.

One argument that gun enthusiasts espouse seems particularly small-minded to me: Because more than half of the 30,000 shooting deaths per year are suicides, they suggest that we should not count them in the gun-violence death toll. But if there were not so many guns around, fewer people would commit suicide, because most of the other ways of doing it are so much less decisive and more affording of reconsideration. No one wants the end of a despairing person’s life to be so easy or so violent as pulling a trigger. We want them (need them, in fact) to turn their backs on despair and stick with us for the duration.

— Mike Pankratz