A dot-com entrepreneur is willing to spend a whole bunch of money to help design and implement common-sense solutions to gun violence.

Andrew McKelvey, who founded the job-hunting and recruitment site Monster.com, has dedicated $12 million (of his $2.1 billion) to a new group called Americans for Gun Safety. Part of that budget is to provide $60,000 each to the organization’s state offices so that they can equip and staff offices. The organization focuses on enforcement of existing weapons laws and safety standards to prevent firearms from being discharged either accidentally or by someone other than their rightful owners.

Note that the organization is not called "Americans for Gun Control." Its agenda includes nothing about restricting the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. Its goal isn’t to prevent the sale and ownership of firearms, but to prevent the crimes and accidents that firearms make worse.

The question to be answered now is whether Second Amendment groups will support this effort. So far they haven’t, and yet this may be the best way to safeguard the right they hold so dear.

Inflammatory rhetoric to the contrary, there has not been any large or coordinated push to take guns away from Americans. There is no well-planned "whittling away" of civil rights. Neither is there any organized plot by "communists" or any other bogeymen to further their own aim by capitalizing on growing concern over gun violence. That’s not what responsible gun owners have to fear.

What they should be concerned about is the fact that their own peers resist common-sense efforts like those of this organization, and by doing so, force their opponents to take ever more radical approaches in attempting to enact safeguards. Polarization on this issue means that a group that actually would be satisfied by legislation requiring locked gun safes or trigger locks on firearms in households with small children may begin its bargaining by positing that all firearms should be banned. That, unfortunately, diverts attention from debating safeguards for children to debating safeguards for constitutional rights. More children die, and another push is mounted.

All that political maneuvering could be avoided if we could agree that safeguards don’t necessarily equal controls and don’t necessarily infringe upon anyone’s rights. It’s difficult to understand why the gun lobby, funded as it is by people who believe they need guns for their own personal safety, cannot understand that other citizens fear for their safety as well. It’s not unreasonable for them to seek assurances that they won’t be shot with stolen handguns, or that their children won’t be shot with guns their playmates found in their own homes.