In his op-ed, “Gun control is fine, except for not working” (Vindicator June 26) Jay Ambrose offers a litany of claims in defense of the gun lobby’s relentless crusade to block any legislative measure that addresses the public-health crisis that kills 33,000 Americans every year. He’s wrong; common-sense laws keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people and reduce gun violence. There are numerous studies that prove the point.

The “guns everywhere” outlook of Mr. Ambrose defies logic. As Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, said, “If loose gun laws and more guns made us safer, we’d be the safest country in the world.” We aren’t, by an order of magnitude. According to the American Journal of Medicine, the gun homicide rate in the U.S. is 25 times higher than in other high-income countries. The vast majority of Americans get it; in a just published study by Pew Research, 83 percent of Americans say gun violence is a problem, and strong majorities support reasonable gun laws such as universal background checks, barring suspected terrorists from buying guns and stopping the sale of weapons of war.

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Despite the paucity of research that could guide solutions to the gun violence crisis that has killed or injured one half million Americans since the Sandy Hook shooting, numerous studies have concluded that weak laws encourage violence while smart firearm laws prevent gun death and injury. A study published by Duke Law found that for every 10 to 20 gun removal cases under Connecticut’s risk warrant law (aka “gun violence restraining order”), one suicide was prevented. On the flip side, a study just released by researchers at Stanford Law School and Columbia University found that “violent crime is substantially higher” in states with loose restrictions on carrying weapons in public.