Frida Berrigan [Senior Program Associate, Arms and Security Initiative, New America Foundation]: "Hidden amidst news of the global financial meltdown, the Bernie Madoff guilty pleas and spring's slow approach in the last week, was the story of global gun violence. A German rampager killed 16, an Alabama man killed 10 people, a man killed five people at a birthday party in Miami, in the North of Ireland three people have been killed and many more wounded in a new wave of political violence, and in Mexico the war between heavily armed drug gangs and police and security forces grinds on.

What is to be done? In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel is calling for stricter enforcement of a set of gun control laws already deemed some of the strongest in the world. This should serve as a wakeup call to policy makers in the United States where gun control laws are a patchwork of strict to lax. Depending on the state, a would-be gun-buyer can trade cash for guns over a card table at a flea market, or be subjected to a background check, a seven-day waiting period, and a one-gun-a-month policy. Savvy gun buyers exploit the differences in state laws, forge documents, set up straw purchasers and circumvent the law in countless other creative and malicious ways. There are so many guns being bought this way, that the Mexican ambassador to the United States estimates that 2,000 "Made in the USA" guns cross the border every day.

Stronger, more uniform laws that are strictly enforced will shrink the loopholes through which angry people walk to grab guns and make mayhem.

The "right to bear arms" is protected by our Constitution but it cannot be interpreted as the right buy an assault rifle to mow people down in a mega-church parking lot. Allowing the Pastor to pack heat is not an adequate response.

President Barack Obama has his hands full with the economy, the budget and foreign policy flare-ups from Pakistan to Madagascar, but we live in a country where 30,000 Americans are killed and another 70,000 are wounded every year by gun violence, where rampages like the ones that took ten lives in Alabama or five in Miami are commonplace and we are in critical need of leadership on this issue."