I am a gun owner. I learned to shoot as a kid, at a summer camp in Lake Placid, where one of the highlights of every July was the walk down to the rifle range, the smell of pine needles, the careful instruction from counselors who treated firearms with the seriousness they deserved, the small paper targets we carried back to the cabin like trophies. That experience taught me to respect guns, not to fear them, and it is part of why I believe so strongly that the rights of law-abiding Americans to own firearms must be protected. I also know that saying what I am about to say in NY-21, a conservative-leaning district where Second Amendment politics run deep, and where the safer move for any candidate is to stay quiet, hedge, or simply echo the loudest voices, is not the politically convenient path. I am going to say it anyway. The lives of our kids and the safety of our communities are too important to be governed by political calculation. If we can’t run on our values and our honest beliefs, then winning isn’t worth it.

It is also why I have no patience for the idea that caring about gun rights and caring about gun deaths are somehow opposing positions. They are not. Few debates in American life have become as entrenched as the one over guns. On one side, advocates demand sweeping restrictions and sometimes outright bans. On the other hand, opponents resist almost any new regulation as a slippery slope toward confiscation. Lost in the shouting is a quieter majority of Americans, gun owners like me, and non-owners alike, who believe both that the Second Amendment protects an individual right and that reasonable, targeted policies can reduce gun deaths, particularly in our schools. A sensible position takes both convictions seriously.

Firearms are now the leading cause of death for American children and teens, surpassing motor vehicle accidents. School shootings, while statistically rare compared to other forms of gun violence, have a uniquely traumatic effect on a generation of students who now practice active-shooter drills the way earlier generations practiced fire drills. Suicides account for more than half of all gun deaths, and most domestic-violence homicides involve a firearm. These are not partisan facts; they are the conditions in which American families live. A position that refuses to acknowledge them is not serious.

At the same time, more than 80 million Americans own firearms, the vast majority lawfully and responsibly. People like me, and like the families I grew up around. The rights of those law-abiding citizens, to defend their homes, to hunt, to teach their kids to shoot at a camp in the mountains the way I was taught, deserve real protection. Policies that treat every gun owner as a suspect, or that promise sweeping bans likely to be struck down or simply ignored, do not make anyone safer. They also poison the political climate in which real solutions might pass.

Polling consistently shows that large majorities of Americans, including most gun owners and a majority of Republicans, support a handful of specific measures. An intelligent position starts here, where consensus already exists, rather than relitigating the culture war. On one issue—the military-style semi-automatic rifles that have featured in our worst mass shootings—I go a step further than the broad consensus, and I want to be clear-eyed about why.

1)    Universal background checks. Federal law requires licensed dealers to run background checks but exempts most private sales, including many at gun shows and online. Closing this gap so that essentially all commercial firearm transfers go through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) is supported by roughly 80–90% of Americans in repeated polling. It does not restrict who can own a gun; it just ensures the existing rules actually apply.

2)    Red flag laws (Extreme Risk Protection Orders). These laws let family members or law enforcement petition a court to temporarily remove firearms from a person showing serious signs of danger to themselves or others; a credible threat, a suicide plan, a domestic-violence escalation. Due-process protections require evidence and a judicial finding, and the order is time-limited. Twenty-one states and D.C. now have some version. The shooter in Parkland, the shooter in Uvalde, and many others showed warning signs that, under a red flag framework, could have triggered intervention.

3)    Safe storage requirements. Most firearms used in school shootings by minors come from the home of a parent or relative. Requiring that guns in homes with children be stored locked and unloaded, and holding adults accountable when negligent storage enables a tragedy, is a minimal imposition on responsible owners (who largely do this already) and a major intervention against youth suicide, accidental shootings, and school attacks.

4)    Strengthening the “boyfriend loophole.” Federal law has long barred domestic abusers convicted of misdemeanors from owning firearms, but only if they were married to, lived with, or had a child with the victim. The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act extended this to dating partners, a meaningful step that should be preserved and enforced, but should be extended to those with protective restraining orders issued against them.

5)    Investing in mental health, school safety, and community violence intervention. Hardened school entries, threat-assessment teams trained to spot warning signs, school counselors and psychologists in adequate numbers, and community programs that interrupt cycles of retaliatory shootings in cities—these address the conditions in which violence grows, not just the tools. They also have the rare virtue of being supported across the political spectrum.

6)    Targeted regulation of military-style semi-automatic rifles. This is where the politics get harder, and I want to be honest about that. The AR-15 and similar platforms are the firearms used in the deadliest mass shootings of the last decade—Uvalde, Buffalo, Highland Park, Parkland, Las Vegas. No one is coming for hunting rifles, shotguns, or the handgun in your nightstand, but a narrow set of reforms aimed at this specific category of weapon is overdue. First, raise the minimum purchase age to 21. Federal law already requires age 21 to buy a handgun from a licensed dealer; the rifle exception is a historical accident, not a principled distinction, and an eighteen-year-old who cannot legally buy a beer or a pistol should not be able to walk out of a store with a semi-automatic rifle. Florida raised the age to 21 across the board after Parkland under a Republican governor and legislature, and the policy has held up in court. Second, bring these rifles under the National Firearms Act. The NFA, on the books since 1934, regulates machine guns, short-barreled rifles, and suppressors through fingerprinting, an enhanced background check, registration, and a transfer tax. It does not ban these items; millions are lawfully owned under it. Applying the same framework to AR-style rifles would preserve ownership for serious, responsible buyers while ensuring a more rigorous vetting process for a category of weapon designed for rapid, high-capacity fire. Third, eliminate bump stocks and similar rate-of-fire conversion devices. A bump stock turns a semi-automatic rifle into a functional automatic weapon; the Las Vegas shooter used them to fire more than a thousand rounds in eleven minutes. The Trump administration banned them by regulation in 2018, and the Supreme Court struck down that rule in 2024 on administrative-law grounds, leaving it to Congress to act. Congress should. Fourth, limit magazine capacity for civilian sales to ten or fifteen rounds. Most defensive uses of a firearm involve very few shots; high-capacity magazines, by contrast, are a recurring feature of mass-casualty attacks, where the forced pause to reload is often when victims escape or attackers are stopped. Standard-capacity magazines for hunting and target shooting remain widely available within these limits.

A sensible approach is not a stalking horse for confiscation. It does not call for repealing the Second Amendment, banning handguns, or building a national gun registry. It does not assume that the millions of Americans who hunt, sport-shoot, or keep a firearm for self-defense are the problem.

It is also not naïve. No single policy will end mass shootings. Determined attackers will find weapons; some of the measures above will only marginally reduce risk. But margins matter. Several lives saved, several attacks prevented, several suicides interrupted; these are not small things.

The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first significant federal gun legislation in nearly thirty years, passed with bipartisan support precisely because it focused on the kinds of measures described above. More can be done in that same spirit: incremental, evidence-based, respectful of rights, and aimed squarely at the people and situations that drive the worst outcomes. American children should not have to learn lockdown drills as a condition of going to school, and American gun owners should not have to accept that any compromise will be used to take everything. I want my country to be one where a kid can still walk down to a rifle range at summer camp and learn what I learned, and also one where that same kid can walk into school on Monday without fear. Those goals are not in conflict. There is a workable middle, and most of the country is already standing in it.