Can we finally get smart about guns?

The photo that got me Tuesday about the shootings in suburban Denver was the one shared by my sister-in-law, who lives in Boulder. It was taken by abystander and showed a bunch of little kids standing in a line with their hands on their heads. They had just evacuated their charter school where two older students waded into a couple of classes and began firing. One student died and eight classmates were injured.

The shooters were arrested with some difficulty. We’ll soon learn how they came by their handguns, said to be at least two pistols. My guess is they took them from home, since unlike most rifles and shotguns, you can’t buy handguns until you are 21. But we’ll know soon.

Already, the response has been riven by the predictable politics. The left cries out for gun control. The right, including a Columbine survivor who leads the Colorado House, says we need more armed security, checkpoints and “hardening” of security at schools. I guess barbed wire and patrol dogs will be in the mix soon.

Gun control is controversial, but it doesn’t have to be. We can start with some simple things that are true: America has the highest number of shootings in the world. A few years ago, when I was running the stats for a deep look into gun violence in the U.S., we had 33,000 killings from guns, with about 22,000 of those from suicide. That suicide number is especially heartbreaking, because it’s so preventable. Most of those who attempt suicide and survive don’t try again. But to be given that chance to live they have to survive the attempt. When guns are their chosen tool, they rarely do.

We also have — and this is not even close — more guns available than anywhere on the planet. Hundreds of millions of firearms of nearly every description: We’re overflowing with pistols, rifles and other firearms.

Can’t we simply agree that the extraordinarily unusual availability of firearms in America is a contributing factor in the extraordinary high number of gun deaths? Not just mass shootings such as the heartbreaking examples in Colorado and North Carolina this month, but accidents, suicides and more?

Once we recognize the two facts are related, can’t we agree that, at the very least, some especially risky people ought to have a more difficult time acquiring especially dangerous guns?

That’s easy to understand, and should be a beginning point we can all embrace. Who’s risky? Well, young people’s brains are not yet fully formed. We could start with them, as some states (like Republican-led Florida) have raised the age for assault-rifle style guns to 21. That’s a start. People with certain criminal histories? People with mental health markers? We do this already in a spotty way, and we know how to do it and still respect due process and fairness. But if we’re going to harden our security, let’s start with enforcing tougher background checks and more widely adopting (as Colorado recently did) red-flag laws.

We needn’t ban all firearms. Besides, the courts have already ruled that blanket bans on, say, all handguns in a large city violate the Second Amendment. But that has never meant we can’t draw up and then enforce sane rules for who can get access to what kinds of guns. Making some people work harder to get certain types of gun — by undergoing a more stringent test, or alonger waiting period, for instance — only makes sense. The Supreme Court has already ruled that it’s also perfectly constitutional. Maybe some guns, as already is the case with machines guns, might be best left out of the general population and reserved for commercial venues like shooting ranges?

There is room for debate on all of this, and for a smart calculous to determine who’s risky, what’s especially dangerous, and how to make it less likely that the former has access to the latter.

Tuesday’s shootings were especially heartbreaking for me because this one felt personal. I spent last week in a houseful of friends that included two delightful twin brothers. They’re freshmen at a Denver school not far from where the shootings occurred Tuesday. The news hit me like a punch in the face. My nieces are college-aged now, but they grew up not far from there, too.

So yes, this one seemed more personal. But in America these days, there’s nothing special about that. All of us have these kinds of stories. One of the kids who described the scene Tuesday told a reporter that he’d never heard agun shot before so he wasn’t sure what was happening. He was 8, I believe. Now he’ll know — just like so many others throughout America. When I was a kid in Kentucky, we all assumed the Soviets would bomb us one day, if for no other reason than because we lived near all that gold in Fort Knox. We had drills at school. Sirens were tested. It was just part of the Cold War atmosphere — and it left its marks on all of us.

The Cold War ended about the time I left for college. But a whole new fear has grown in the psyches of the kids who followed. It’s terrifying.

New laws might not have stopped these terrible shootings in Colorado and North Carolina. Not all of them, anyway. There are too many other factors at play in addition to the availability of guns. But they would make those determined to become shooters work a little harder to do so. That will save lives. Not every life, but some, perhaps many.

What are we waiting for?

Lindenberger is deputy opinion editor at The Houston Chronicle and a member of its editorial board.