Dear Editor:

The thing about guns and suicide is that guns make suicide easy and efficient. That is the nature of guns and why most people would prefer to counter a violent threat with a gun as opposed to a baseball bat or a chef's knife.

It has been well demonstrated that the rate of suicide is higher where there is a gun in the house. The most interesting study comes out of Australia that experiences a steady decline of suicides after imposing a very restrictive gun ownership policy.

But what is troubling is that these critics of even the most modest and reasonable measures to reduce gun violence seem to have no regard to the thousands of innocent lives that are lost to gun violence. They seem to think that their right to bear arms is an absolute right even above the right of others to their lives.

Critics of gun safety laws would rather quibble over the statistics than suffer a closer examination of the ethical foundation of any claim that broad and easy access to guns is somehow a societal good.

We have a moral obligation to staunch the blood that flows from our overly lax gun laws. Requiring universal background checks is a reasonable and modest step in the right direction. Bad guys should not be allowed to buy guns from anyone.

Fred W. Nehring

Boothbay