How is this productive dialogue? How is this reaching across the aisle? This is a rapist telling the victim, "Hold still so I don't have to kill you." This is a thief advising his co-conspirators not to try taking everything at once because it's causing too much agitation among the targets and making the theft more difficult and dangerous.

You want to talk about the impact of the black community, but that's a problem OF and FROM the black community. So long as they allow themselves to be led and spoken for by people who blame everything on white people, including every action of a government chosen by a black majority electorate, so long as they destroy their own lives with pathological behavior, no amount of "gun safety" is going to help them! Aside from academics, politicians and the media long for something to preach about, "gun safety" primarily appeals to, and benefits, weak & nervous suburban women, terrified of unlikely accidents and urban myths and desperate to retain the social power traditionally enjoyed by white women even as the rest of the world scorns them for their skin color and men are starting to resent the double-standards. Black people are just another shield used to advance policy agendas. We've spent billions subsidizing criminal communities and social pathology, while they portray themselves as crime victims, and yet march (and riot) in support of criminals, serve on juries who refuse to convict criminals and elect politicians who oppose conventional policing - because the criminals are their neighbors, schoolmates, and family members, and to them, skin color is more important than predation. If 100 years ago, we had treated Southern Italians the way we treat blacks, the Mafia would have taken over the country.

You want to talk about the black community, by which everyone means in the inner city sort, the standing gun control policies and practices effectively make legal gun ownership extremely difficult, with time and price requirements to obtain a permit and legal guns that are often too much trouble for people in those circumstances, and everything Kristoff proposes would make it worse.

As always, the things the the elites allow to be called "reasonable" are an example of Kodos and Kang bipartisanship. In an old Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode, the two aliens impersonated Clinton and Dole to run for president on a joint ticket and take control of the country. Initially offering abortion for everyone, they are booed by half the crowd. They switch to banning abortion, and are booed by the other half, so they propose "Abortions for some, tiny American flags for others." That's what permissible bipartisanship always amounts to - substantive policy for one side, superficial gestures or showmanship for the other.

In this country, the right to bear arms is mostly been honored in the breech, with law after law being passed on spurious grounds, without ever targeting the ostensible wrongdoers, merely increasing the regulatory burden on the law-abiding and making the country a safer and safer place to operate for the lawless. And your idea of "reason" is to appease the violators, to call an editorial demanding still more restrictions, and openly calling for action against the most effective weapons, "reasonable". Because he's willing to demand less of what he has no right to in the first place, you think that's good.

Answer me this sincerely: Excluding words and a cessation of attacks, What does Kristoff offer? What would he allow people to do that they are not currently allowed to do?