YES, IT'S true that people kill people, and that street thugs have plenty of illegal ways to get guns. But it doesn't help matters in a violence-prone society to have so much hardware so readily accessible.

In this time of shattered windows, terrorized housing projects, endangered playgrounds and outgunned cops, this time when high school dances and pick-up basketball games degenerate into gun fights, law-abiding people have the right to proclaim that they do not have to sit idly by and let this continue unchallenged because somebody is worried that his hunting rifle is going to get taken away -- or his means of self-defense.

The Brady bill fight, which will be resumed in the Senate, is not about hunting rifles. It is not about banning gun ownership. It is about asserting Americans' right to slow the tide of handgun bloodshed.

No, it won't make for safer streets overnight. It won't even come close. But it can help the majority liberate gun control from the selfish lobbies that defeat it year after year.

It is a statement, finally, that the status quo has become intolerable.