First, I want to express my deepest and most sincere condolences to U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and her familly, as well as to the other victims involved in yesterday's tragic and senseless shooting in Arizona.

Much is being made of the overheated and angry political debate in this country, and rightly so. It is way past the time to begin to restore sanity to the discussion of our differences, and for elected leaders and unelected spokespersons to stop trying to top one another with ever more extreme views. But to me, this sad incident also brings to mind a deeper problem, one that America has ignored for far too long, namely, that we have a real problem with out-of-control gun violence.

The United States is among the worst of nations in every category of gun violence (e.g., total deaths from guns, murders by guns, suicide by guns, and so on). While we're not the worst, the countries with worse records (South Africa, Brazil, Mexico) are generally nations struggling with rampant poverty, political instability, and lack of government services.

While we certainly do have some of those same problems here in the United States, the degree of the problems is certainly not enough to put us in the same category of firearm violence. Compared to countries like our neighbor Canada and most European countries, our rates of firearm violence are far, far higher, and the reason is obviously the widespread and easy availability to guns in this country.

According to statistics, one of the consequences of our general affluence is that the United States leads the world in percentage of households owning guns (39%). While still among the global leaders, the percentage of households with guns in Canada is roughly a quarter less (29%). However, in 1997, the murder rate in the U.S., 8.95 per 100,000 people, was over four times the rate in Canada, 1.9 per 100,000. The rate in the U.S. has since dropped to 5.7 per 100,000 (2000-2004), but is still unacceptably high for a civilized nation.

But the telling statistic is the rate of homicides involving firearms. In Canada, there were 0.6 homicides per 100,000 persons involving firearms in 1997, not even a third of the total homicides. That year in the United States, ten times as many homicides involved firearms, 6.24 per 100,000 persons.

In other words, our overall murder rate is 4 times greater than Canada's, which is bad enough in itself, but our rate of firearm-related homicide is 10 times greater, which is totally unacceptable.

According to statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and presented on the Brady Center To Prevent Gun Violence web site, on average, 268 people in America, 47 of them children and teens, are shot in murders, assaults, suicides, accidents, and police intervention every day. Every day, 86 people die from gun violence, 35 of them murdered.

This cannot be allowed to continued.

In 2001, following the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, then-President George Bush announced to the nation that global terrorism had been ignored and allowed to fester for far too long, and the tragedy of that terrible day presented a mandate that the problem had to be finally and permanently addressed. I disagree with most of the methods the nation chose to employ in the so-called War on Terrorism, but the point is it took a tragic event to shock us into action.

I propose that the shooting of democratically elected officials in Arizona should awaken us to a realization that we have a pretty serious gun problem here in America, and the shooting should represent a turning point toward more responsible gun laws. For too long, we have allowed gun manufacturers to finance sophisticated campaigns to lead people to believe that any regulation of firearms was a direct attack on our constitutional freedoms, even to the point where their product became an impediment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, if not to democracy altogether. By becoming major contributors to the campaigns of elected officials, gun manufacturers have assured themselves of laws that would provide an almost endless market for their products.

People are dying. It is time for this madness to stop.