Author's Note: If you live outside the United States, you probably already live in a country with sensible controls on handguns so you can read this for amusement or bemusement, as the case may be.

The unusually personal rhetoric that has characterized the Clinton years got real personal when, in the shot heard 'round the Beltway, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) took dead aim at the President with this startling assertion:

''[President Clinton]'s willing to accept a certain level of killing to further his political agenda--and the vice president too, I mean, how else can you explain this dishonesty we get out of the administration.''

LaPierre then went on to repeat the NRA's current line of attack, which is that the Administration doesn't enforce the gun laws we already have and yet it seeks still more.

In the interests of meeting the NRA and Mr. LaPierre more than halfway, I am stepping forward with a proposal to strip away the current welter of confusing gun laws and replace them with a few simple laws that anyone can understand. Here they are.

1) Private citizens may buy all the handguns they want, provided they buy revolvers. After all, the West was won with the humble six-shooter. If it was good enough for Wyatt Earp, a noted gun control advocate in his own day, then it ought to be good enough for you. Of course, no person with a criminal record would be allowed to buy any weapon of any kind.

2) If your revolver is used in a negligent or criminal manner that results in bodily harm to anyone, then you go to jail for 1 to 5 years, depending on the severity of the offense, with no possibility of parole.

3) Document all changes of ownership of a handgun. If you break the chain of documentation, then you go to jail for 1 year. Let's take at least as much care about tracking the whereabouts of a handgun as we do about a 1987 Chevy Impala.

4) If your revolver is stolen, then you pay a fine of $1,000. If the theft is unreported and the revolver is involved in a crime under rule (2), then in addition to the prison term, a fine of $10,000 will be imposed.

As part of the process of implementing these changes I would propose a couple of other modest suggestions:

Immediately launch a program to buy back handguns. Pick a major dollar amount and offer 'no questions asked' turn-ins of handguns. Give incentives to criminals. So many points taken off from the sentencing guidelines for each handgun turned in, regardless of where the handgun came from. (Should your handgun get stolen and turned in, then you would of course pay a fine under Rule 4 above.)

Revise homeowners' insurance policies to require that handgun owners prove they are securely storing their handguns. If you don't report the handgun on your policy, then it voids your homeowners insurance.

What this does is strip away all the confusing rhetoric and establish some important principles. First, any law-abiding citizen has a right to own a handgun for personal protection should they choose to do so. If you take those lessons the NRA keeps talking about, 6 bullets ought to be enough to deter an intruder. What we don't need in circulation are those rapid fire, large capacity handguns that seem to be involved in so many of these rampages by heartsick teens or disgruntled employees.

Second, with ownership comes responsibility. It is up to you to keep your handgun from falling into the wrong hands. If you let your kid take it to school for a little unscheduled show and tell or if you let your handgun get stolen, the hammer falls.

I can hear the bleating-heart conservatives reaching for their well-thumbed copy of the constitution, which no doubt falls open to the 2nd Amendment. We all know what it says: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Well, here is some other language that you don't hear quoted to often:

"In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense."

This quote is from a 1939 Supreme Court decision, U.S. versus Miller. This is the only time the Supreme Court has written anything on the 2nd Amendment. Of course, the Supreme Court could agree to hear a case on this issue any time it wants, but for now the idea that there is a Constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms under the 2nd Amendment remains fiction rather than fact.

As for those who claim that citizens need unlimited access to weapons to defend themselves from invasion, this is romantic nonsense that doesn't stand up to the realities of modern warfare. For those who doubt this, I commend them to look at photographs of downtown Grozny. The not-so-well regulated Chechen militia took on the Russian army. The end result was the near total destruction of Grozny and most of the surrounding countryside. Those rifles didn't stand up to well against long-range artillery, air strikes, and tanks.

Finally, to all those gun advocates who are saying, "See, I told you all they want to do is take away my guns." Well, yeah, actually I wouldn't mind that one damn bit. But that's not what this is about. I'm saying buy revolvers rather than pistols. Hell, buy all the rifles and shotguns you need or want. But let's stop the sale of high-capacity rapid-fire pistols. And let's make gun owners responsible if their negligence results in loss of innocent life or in criminal activities. And let's do something to sop up some of the millions of handguns floating around our society.

I really don't think this is all that much to ask for.

Copyright © 2000 G.J. Lau All Rights Reserved

G.J. Lau toils deep in the bowels of the Washington bureaucracy. A long-time observer of American politics and mores, he now edits his own e-zine, Singleminded, which can be found at http://www.singmind.com/singleminded/ .

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