RESPONSIBLE GUN OWNERS PRACTICE SAFETY

Results of a recent poll, published in the New England Journal of medicine, show that most Americans support gun design standards that could help prevent accidental shootings and make weapons generally safer.

For example, poll respondents indicates support for designing guns so they can't be fired by a child's hands, equipping guns with devices that won't allow anyone but the owner to fire them and making sure guns can't be fired after the ammunition clip is removed.

These all seem like sensible gun-safety ideas. But it would be too easy to take such poll data and start a push for government-mandated safety devices on firearms, even when all sorts of safety devices are currently available to purchasers of firearms.

It seems like a prudent gun owner, one who is interested in safety, would ask for those devices when purchasing a gun -- if there were no other way to make sure the gun won't be used inappropriately, such as locked gun safes and careful storage of ammunition away from unloaded firearms.

Which is exactly what safety-conscious gun owners already do.