Regulation of assault weapons

I like this take by Kristof, which hits the nail home in terms of stats and studies on gun violence:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculates that each year there are more than 11,000 gun homicides and nearly 19,000 gun suicides. That’s 30,000 firearms deaths a year in the United States. At that rate, there have already been some 2,500 violent gun deaths since Sandy Hook. David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard, says that having a gun at home increases the risk of suicide in that household by two to four times.
To reduce auto deaths, we’ve taken a public health approach that you might call “car control” — driver’s licenses, air bags, seat belts, auto registration. The result is a steady decline in vehicle fatalities so that some time soon gun deaths are likely to exceed traffic fatalities, for the first time in modern American history.

See, the point is that no one said we'd ban cars when we had auto deaths. Instead we applied more rules for how you get a car and track ownership. The government didn't "take away your cars" and they aren't going to do that now. But it's about time for registration and careful database tracking on every firearm, along with other commonsense measures to improve public safety (e.g., firing pin markers, bans on all "highly-lethal" ammo types...).