The problem with a lot of anti-gun measures is that the proponents readily admit that they would not have stopped any particular shooter. For instance, people talk about background checks, but this shooter and many others did not have a history and were not known to police. They would have passes a background check.
Often times the person acquiring the gun already broke a number of gun laws. Either straw purchase, borrowed someones gun, carrying across state lines, etc. So throwing more laws at it won't necessarily help. Enforcement of existing laws could help but is obviously difficult. Not to mention that gun violence is much higher in cities/counties/states with the most gun control measures. You can say that they just get the guns from elsewhere and national restrictions need to be imposed, but we should see SOME effect. Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan.
So the conversation from anti-gun people basically amounts to less guns everywhere, but that genie might be out of the bottle already. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US and it would be impractical to seize even a tiny percent of them.
But note that there were always guns in America. In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.
I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exist in 1969? Social media. The internet.
Legislation won’t change anything. <the war on drugs has entered the chat> Proponents of stricter gun control are being idealistic.
Having kids in school right now, we are both quite concerned about the current state of affairs when it comes to school shootings. Making guns illegal won’t stop anyone touched enough to shoot up a school/gay bar/concert/grocery store. They’re going to find a way to do it. To think otherwise is ignorance.
Most other countries have social media. Few other countries have a mass shooting problems. Restricting access to guns absolutely will lower school shootings. A disturbed 18 year old isn't going to have black market gang connections to get a gun.
I fully believe it will help minimize most school shootings, but I don’t think it would deter the more meticulous disturbed shooters like Columbine or perhaps even this most recent Texas shooter. If you are planning it out in detail, figuring out how to print a gun or buy one on the black market probably isn’t much of a deterrent.
I would “only” expect gun control regulation to deter impulsive killings (including a lot of suicide). But it won’t deter criminals who are savvy to the black market, and it’s plausible that they might be more emboldened to victimize more people from the “civilian” population (as opposed to police or rival criminals) if they have more assurance that they’re unarmed. That effect is probably exacerbated in an era of de-policing (if criminals can rely on a hamstrung police force and a disarmed civilian population, they’re probably going to be even bolder).
> A disturbed 18 year old isn't going to have black market gang connections to get a gun.
Apparently you've never been to Baltimore and/or forget what it was like to be 18. Show me a law prohibiting or vastly restricting something and I'll show you a very healthy black market for said thing.
Yeah an 18 year old including even Salvador could have easily 3d printed an FGC-9 without any connections and that would have done everything he sought out to do at the close quarters he was operating in.
This guy clearly had spent months saving up for a fucking Daniel Defense (gucci) AR on fast food wages, he absolutely had the time and dedication to have found another equally lethal method. If ARs didn't exist he'd have undoubtable used something else equally lethal.
That's not consistent with the reality of the rest of the world. Australia banned guns in 1996 and has had one mass shooting since, compared to 66 in the US in April of this year.
I never found this argument convincing. There are many differences between Australia and the US. It's like saying "American does X and is wealthy and relatively not corrupt, Mexico should just do X". This is the whole "bring democracy to the Middle East" argument repackaged.
US is 59th in murder rate. A lot of these countries have all those things + restrictive gun laws. You can't have a theory and just arbitrarily section off over 50% of countries and test your theory on that subset
The other 58 are either extremely poor or in an actual war/insurgency. I don't deny that poverty and war cause violence but the US does not have those variables
Both those countries require everyone to experience military service, where such a gun is used as a tool to kill. There's much less of a "gun culture" in those countries because guns aren't cool, everyone has used one, everyone is familiar, everyone understands what they are for, namely protection of the country as a whole.
If the alternative to making guns much harder to access is to conscript everyone in the country for a few years to try and beat the gun culture out of them, good freakin luck
I have no doubt that Australia has fewer mass shootings than the US by pretty much any reasonable metric, but we should be careful in our comparisons. First of all, definitions vary widely on what constitutes a “mass shooting”, so we should always give our definition and make sure we’re applying the same definition to both operands (notably, by most common definitions, Australia has had several mass shootings and quite a few more mass murders since 1996).
We should also adjust for known dependent variables, like population, population density, crime rates, number of guns in circulation (i.e., we would intuitively expect fewer mass shootings from a small, sparse, low-abiding country with few guns in circulation irrespective of gun laws)—Australia has only 8% of the US population and only 10% of the density—not sure about crime rates. I also suspect there were fewer guns in circulation prior to 1996, so even if officials could get the same share removed from the US market, it would likely leave more guns in circulation than in America (even adjusting for population, etc)—I also doubt Americans would be as willing to give up their guns as Australians were in ‘96, so the odds that America could get the same share of guns off the market as Australia did seems unlikely.
That said, I’ve read that Australia’s gun count has crept back up to pre-96 levels (not sure if that is per capita or not), which is interesting—potentially it suggests there’s something else going on: either it matters what type of guns are banned (e.g., semi-automatic handguns), or perhaps there’s an altogether different reason or hidden factor behind the decline in Australian mass shootings.
In any case, mass shootings is probably the wrong metric, but rather we probably want to look at number of mass murder deaths overall (presumably some people switch to stabbings or arson, but both of these are probably result in fewer fatalities). It’s also not clear to me why we fixate on mass murders/shootings rather than homicides overall—is it really worse when 10 people are killed all at once rather than 10000 people killed individually?
It was the first fatal mass shooting in the UK since the Cumbria shootings of 2010. In response, the Home Office announced that it would issue updated guidelines for firearms licence applications.
Mass shootings are rare in the UK, with the most recent previous being a spree shooting in Cumbria in 2010, and the one before a school shooting in Dunblane in 1996.
Along with the 1987 Hungerford massacre and the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, it is one of the worst criminal acts involving firearms in British history.
First off, you didn't say "school" originally, you just said mass shooting and there have been several in the UK since the gun ban; also it doesn't matter if innocent people are killed at a school or elsewhere, what matters is that they were killed. Secondly, the "zero deaths" shooting had 12 wounded; the lack of deaths wasn't for a lack of trying and I'm sure those people would have preferred not to have been shot. Thirdly, most of those American mass shootings in the Wikipedia article aren't mass shootings in that they aren't some crazy killing random strangers, they are gang violence; you may as well include all of the UK's gang homicides then. Many of the school "mass shootings" also had no deaths. For example, Wikipedia counts this as a school shooting: "An individual who was not a student accidentally shot himself in the leg in the parking lot of Glades Central High School". No reasonable person can say that is the same as what happened in Texas, and dozens of the "school shootings" in the list are similar to the parking lot accident.
The deadliest mass shooting of all time happened in France in 2015 and the second deadliest happened in Norway in 2011 (yes, deadlier than any American mass shooting). Europe has had a large number of mass killings. Here's a PARTIAL list (since there are no activist groups compiling lists of "mass" "shootings" in Europe like there are in the US, it's difficult to find them without scanning old news articles) of SCHOOL shootings in Europe over the last twenty years (and yes it is fair to compare the US to all of Europe due to population and size; European countries are equivalent to American states (which have varying degrees of gun control)): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31515008. Additionally, there have been a lot of European mass killings that weren't targeted at schools like the Manchester Arena Bombing, Charlie Hebdo, the aforementioned Bataclan and Oslo massacres, the Nice truck attack, the various vehicle ramming attacks in London and elsewhere in Europe, and more. Your gun bans haven't prevented crazies from killing massive amounts of innocents, neither with guns nor with other methods.
Not a single one of those was a mass shooting by the common definition. They were all just random murders/attempted murders, which your continent has quite a lot of as well. The only difference is you don't have lobbyists who compile lists on Wikipedia.
Social media as we know it today didn't exist in 1999 when the Columbine high school shooting happened. That's the first mass school shooting in my memory, though Wikipedia lists several before that, as far back as the late 80s.
The first of that kind of shooting that I know of was in the 60s in the University of Texas. Before that there was a school massacre in the 20s but they used a bomb.
> I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exist in 1969? Social media. The internet.
Also cable TV news. The need to drive viewers to consume a surfeit of airtime probably lead to a lot of socially damaging choices. I'd say it's a qualitatively different thing than the nightly news.
Another important question is what things did exist in 1969 that don't exist now (or are far, far weaker).
Yes they will find a way .. it is always like that .. and so should we. It is not a perfect solution to ban AR-15s and like guns but it is an incremental solution. Opinions may vary to its effectiveness but it is 1000 percent worth a try. I don't care about someone's right to own guns like that. F** it.
>> Making guns illegal won’t stop anyone touched enough to shoot up a school/gay bar/concert/grocery store. They’re going to find a way to do it.
Somehow in my country (Poland) and in most of Europe they do not find a way to get the guns. Most of incidents of this class is done with knife or with some kind of vehicle (car or truck). I think that throughout history we had like literally one or two shootings in schools and I don't think in any one instance there was automatic weapon involved.
To think that this kind of prohibition of gun possession does not work You have to be really ignorant of what really is happening in other countries.
That's an interesting point though. In Poland, you can own certain guns, right? A Polish friend of mine told me he owned various guns, including semi auto pistols.I know you can own these in other central European countries too, like the Czech Republic, Switzerland and probably others. These guns can generally fire at least 15 rounds as fast as you can pull the trigger, and you can reload in seconds. The Virginia Tech killer used 2 of these to kill 32 people.
Now I'm sure my friend had to go through more extensive vetting than they have in the US. But here's the strange part: many US mass shooters would pass these checks anyway. Not all, certainly. But many would. So when you say "they do not find a way to get the guns", you're suggesting that the potential mass murderers are out there, looking for a way, but failing to get the guns. But clearly they should be succeeding occasionally, the legal way. And yet we don't see it. Why not?
We need to know what else is different about the US. But why complicate things by comparing the US to vastly different countries? Why not compare it to a mostly similar country: itself from the recent past. The US has had essentially the same gun laws forever. There have been 2 major overhauls to US gun ownership: one in the 30s and one in the 60s. Other than that, basically no changes. But these mass killings are fairly new, having started in earnest in the late 90s. Why? It's not surprising that the body count has increased, since AR-15s are more deadly than the kind of guns Americans used to commonly own 30 years ago. They have become incredibly popular in recent years and are very cheap and accessible now. But as I pointed out earlier, there's nothing stopping anyone from racking up a huge number of victims using the kind of semi automatic pistol that has been around for over 100 years, and we do see this in the US.
This question weighs on my mind all the time. What is different about the US? I feel as though I know the answer, but it's ephemeral, hard to put words on it. Everything is more extreme here. Success, failure, happiness, misery, love, hate. So in a sense it's not that surprising that the crimes are more extreme too. But I know that's not a very useful observation. I just know that it's 100% possible for people to be able to own guns, and for this stuff to not happen. Hopefully it's possible in America too.
>> That's an interesting point though. In Poland, you can own certain guns, right? A Polish friend of mine told me he owned various guns, including semi auto pistols.I know you can own these in other central European countries too, like the Czech Republic, Switzerland and probably others.
You are heavily underestimating how comparatively hard is to get any kind of gun here. Literally no one in my family and not one of my close friends and event my neighbors in my apartment block have access to ANY kind of gun.
Sure there is possibility if You have lots of time and money and if you are relatively stable person to get a gun (I used to know a guy who was a member of shooting club and thus was able to buy himself a gun), but this process has so many hoops that it is actively discouraging from obtaining one just because you fancy one (as an impulse buy). And thus I believe that it makes it a lot harder for unstable people to get hands on them when they got the impuls to do some damage (I believe that planning and persistence required to get gun here is antithesis to what makes those people go on killing spree).
>> So when you say "they do not find a way to get the guns", you're suggesting that the potential mass murderers are out there, looking for a way, but failing to get the guns. But clearly they should be succeeding occasionally, the legal way. And yet we don't see it. Why not?]
I think that's because they are a lot persistent that You believe them to be. Emotions and planning do not go together well. And there is also social element here - You have to be in a sport club and be vouched by others to get to the guns. This two things put together seems to eliminate almost all individuals that would otherwise blow out tunneling their anger through guns.
Thanks for the response. I'm from a European country that is even more restrictive than Poland and I used to shoot there before I moved to the US, so I have some idea of what it's probably like. I might be conflating a broad range of US mass shootings - for instance I'm thinking of the Las Vegas shooter, who planned meticulously for a very long time. Now, granted he could not have amassed a dozen AR-15s in any other country in any amount of time, but I believe he could have done something. Could a guy like that get a gun in Poland? I don't think it's out of the question. I know the Columbine shooters probably could not have. But then, they made home made bombs too, which they could probably have done anywhere. We just don't see evidence of this kind of motivation showing up in other countries.
>You are heavily underestimating how comparatively hard is to get any kind of gun here
>Sure there is possibility if You have lots of time and money
You seem to be unaware of Polish gun laws. Black powder traditional firearms are virtually unregulated in Poland. A replica black powder revolver is a fully competent self defense revolver. Watch paul harrell or a number of videos about these weapons and you'll understand a Polish person can get a damn good lethal revolver with basically no barriers. It's my understanding you may even be able to conceal carry them completely legally as well, without any license whatsoever.
As far as I know this kind of weapon is not freely available in shops and even if they have it for sale You need to have speciall european gun card.
And this kind of guns requires skills to use - I do not believe that mass shooting is even possible with it.
As I said the main barrier is that there is no possibility to impulse buy. There is also culture apect (here in Poland guns are not popular and almost no one knows how to use them).
>As far as I know this kind of weapon is not freely available in shops and even if they have it for sale You need to have speciall european gun card.
You do not need the european gun card to buy these in Poland. You can have shipped (like from https://saguaro-arms.com/) or just from a private transaction. You do not need the gun card to buy the powder in a private (or "gifted") transaction either.
>And this kind of guns requires skills to use
A percussion black powder revolver takes a little more skill than a cartridge one, but not much. It's also quite deadly.
>I do not believe that mass shooting is even possible with it
Yes if you ignore the entire 18th and most of the 19th century, during which masses of people were killed with these weapons.
>As I said the main barrier is that there is no possibility to impulse buy.
Private sale is unregulated [0]. Conceal carry appears to be legal without permit [0]. Just as here in US I can get a pistol legally in 5 minutes with no checks or registration or permit, same can be done for a black powder revolver in Poland.
Watch Paul Harrell explain these firearms, they're no joke and I recommend every Polish resident consider one for self defense.
I do not think you understand the difference between being able to buy the gun in Walmart (or rather Biedronka in hypothetical nightmare land) and the ability to procure one by looking for dealer on the internet or accessing foreign internet shop. The former one allows impuls buys and the later one has a barrier of entry. And proper layered barrier of entry (no guns around to take or buy, peer pressure to not have gun, illegality of possession of most types without licence) is in my opinion a key to understand why I'm not afraid to send children to school here.
>> they're no joke and I recommend every Polish resident consider one for self defense
Defense from what? Poland is rather safe country at this point and most of what's going on here is simple robberies which when combined with easy access to guns would quite easily change to manslaughter galore.
And I like our gun statistics and would love them stay this way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...)
To buy a gun in a walmart requires a background check and more thorough vetting than to buy this revolver in Poland.
Also the Texas shooter bought his gun online, which is more of a hassle than buying a black powder revolver online in Poland. Buying that shooter's rifle requires shipping to a dealer and then a background check. Buying the blackpowder weapons requires neither.
> my opinion a key to understand why I'm not afraid to send children to school here.
The homicide rate of elementary school students in the US is 0.7 per ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND per year. The rate of unintentional injury resulting in death is roughly at least double for all age groups. If you are terrified of a one in a hundred thousand chance, but not a double or better chance of unintentional injury resulting in death then you are simply an irrational actor. If you feel safe with a ~2 per 100,000 unintentional injury then you should feel only slightly less safe adding in homicides (which Poland isn't free of either). If the thought of school shooting death would terrify you from sending your kid to school then you should be cowering in fear at the chance your child will sustain some unintentional injury on the play ground or in transit to school.
And this is all ignoring the fact that if you're a Pole moving to America and you don't get involved in drugs or gangs then your odds of suffering from violent crime absolutely plummets.
>Defense from what? Poland is rather safe country
Poland is not free from violence and cities near your border are being bombed by a murderous dictator. If you want to be defenseless that's your prerogative.
>easy access to guns
Which Poland already has. I could fly to Poland tomorrow as a tourist and have a revolver the next day and a reliable semi-auto pistol or carbine a couple weeks later (3d printed, durable for 1000+ rounds). All from buying unregulated components within EU and without any sort of permit card.
>> To buy a gun in a walmart requires a background check and more thorough vetting than to buy this revolver in Poland.
Oh wow I did not know that they require this now - this is somehow amazing because You are actually providing arguments for my side of debate (according to this https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2018/02/28/walmart-st... walmart self regulated itself despite moderate law).
In all You have few good arguments for You thing (which is I assume gun in every household?). I just do not get why anyone would want that. The idea that You can somehow defend yourself without any additional risk is pure fantasy (as they say if you take out gun better be ready to use it) - I believe that one of the greatest inventions of human kind is state/government monopoly on violence. This of course can and actually was abused many times but no implementation of idea is perfect but this does not mean that the idea itself is invalid.
And just to finish I think I must comment on this:
>> Poland is not free from violence and cities near your border are being bombed by a murderous dictator. If you want to be defenseless that's your prerogative
What kind of fantasy land are You living that You think that You can actually defend from bombardment, or tanks, or organized military units with gun? You might have seen too many action movies.
If by accident You are part of any kind of paramilitary organization that by all means - sure you can try to stop some military man coming Your way but You do not need to posses private guns for that - one armory per district is more than enough to hand out whatever You may need (as it actually was done in Ukraine - the guns were handed out after the war started).
>What kind of fantasy land are You living that You think that You can actually defend from bombardment, or tanks, or organized military units with gun?
Perhaps in the same 'fantasy' land where the Chechens actually did that exact thing against the same army I'm referring to, and in fact established an independent nation that was at one point even recognized by Russia?
Also I'm referring to defense against common criminals, which even Poland has, who might want violence. Of course the common criminal can easily get a gun, it's only the law abiding innocent who may have reservation about getting a gun in Poland.
> I believe that one of the greatest inventions of human kind is state/government monopoly on violence.
The state has the monopoly on 'legitimate' violence according to these theories, but the state never has a monopoly on all violence. I'd like to note the many Jews in Poland who were genocided after being disarmed. And to note during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, smuggled and captured arms were used by common citizens to at least kill off a few Nazis so there would be one less Nazi to oppress the citizens.
You ask really good questions in your comment. Some of them I've pondered myself, and it is hard to put into words. Everything being more extreme here in the US is actually a decent way to put it.
You can simply take a quick drive just about anywhere and notice it. There is some kind of sickness that has taken hold. I couldn't even begin to list all the reasons why I think this has happened, but American society to me seems so far past the point of no return. One example I have is that I commuted a good bit before the pandemic - anecdotally I noticed an uptick in road rage in that politically charged circa 2015/16' + year range. I'm not sure if the data would back it up, but things seemed to be spilling over into real life to me.
Going off on a tangent here, but I am prior military and also a gun owner with permit to carry concealed. I do armed security once a month and some extra days for special events here and there. I was raised around weapons and I vividly remember going out by myself at 12 years old with a rifle and plinking, hunting and whatnot. At this point I own mostly sporting rifles and do some occasional reloading. Everything is locked away and if something happens to me they will have to grind the safe open. It is safe to say that I respect guns and their capabilities a lot, but I don't feel that's true with a large amount of the gun population. I personally know several.
If there was some kind of miracle opportunity presented to me that all this violence would magically stop if Americans got rid of their firearms, I would take that offer no questions asked. I have small children myself and have had tears in my eyes several times this week thinking about the horrific act in Texas.
I've racked my brain several times over the years about this and have no clue what the solution could be on a grand scale. I don't think our politicians are capable of realistic debate to any kind of solution either - everything is so politically charged anymore and that tribal stuff defeats the whole purpose. I agree with certain points from both sides of the spectrum, but either way seems hopeless. I don't want to see anymore senseless killings, but I also need to have the ability to protect myself and my family in this increasingly sick country.
I'm not sure why you think I'm "poo-pooing" on anyone etc, or what that comment is supposed to add to the discussion, but in any case you haven't written anything that contradicts anything that I said.
I still insist that this seems like lack of political will rather than means. I'm sure that there are a lot of ways that this can be done.
It's like with this old saying about how You eat an elephant (a piece at a time).
Same here - this can be done slowly and gradually. It does not have to be done out right.
They could start with limiting current sale of guns (by bringing some control over to who can buy what and when). Introduce some sort licences (but maybe for guns bought after the law was introduced). And than taxing the shit out of bullets (for personal use). Prohibit trade of guns between people (only b2c, this could be quite hard and unpopular but could address the problem of existing guns). And then start to buy guns of people with sufficient premium on price.
This could be costly but I believe that over the time would eliminate this strange culture of mass gun possession.
> "I still insist that this seems like lack of political will rather than means."
Lack of political will = the voting public doesn't want it, literally. If the public wanted it, federal and state legislatures would be in session right now to pass such laws.
Why doesn't the public want it? All the things you suggest hassle legitimate firearms owners, which is a significant voting bloc, driving them right into the arms of the extremist 2nd A. groups and spiking firearms sales drastically every time new harsh legislation is proposed, making the problem even worse.
So why insist on following the same losing strategy that has been followed by gun control advocates in the past? It is culture and public perception that needs to change and addressing that is not something that can be fixed by legislation.
>> Lack of political will = the voting public doesn't want it, literally
Since when this stopped the politician from serving their own intrests (and intrests of the money behind them)?
But You are right it would be better to change the culture but the problem is that there is not a lot of money in taking away guns and at the same time there is a lack of ideological front that could influence people (for example churches somehow do not have problem with guns)
There is evidence that some antidepressants cause "violent suicidal preoccupation". But it's unclear whether that is a significant factor behind the increase in mass shootings.
What if it just stops one in ten. What if only 20 kids are saved and 100 families are not changed forever.
Pro-tip: you're wrong, it would take time, but it would help. I think handguns should be highly regulated, along with magazines over 10 rounds. If you are licensed to own them, you need to have them in a secure location with some way to ascertain they have been tampered with and you are responsible if they are mis-used.
There is plenty of low hanging fruit, but we go after stuff like silencers or "assault style" weapons instead of good common sense rules like limiting ammunition that can be purchased without being consumed at a range.
> So the conversation from anti-gun people basically amounts to less guns everywhere, but that genie might be out of the bottle already. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US and it would be impractical to seize even a tiny percent of them.
And even if we could wrangle the hundreds of millions in circulation, 3D printing democratizes gun manufacture and seems prohibitively hard to regulate.
> Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan. … In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.
I haven’t heard these observations before; I would be really interested to hear potential explanations debated.
> I would be really interested to hear potential explanations debated.
You'll never hear it though. It goes into differences in regional culture and socialization. Anyone that isn't laughably wrong on the topic knows damn well to keep their mouth shut.
Oh, that's what dogleash was saying: only the people who are laughably wrong are willing to talk about it. The people who do understand are the ones who are staying quiet.
The anti-gun rebuttal is that having that many guns around makes breaking the existing laws. I don't care how you do it (buybacks + making it much more cumbersome to get one seem like a good start), the end result that I'm after is that the US goes from 120 guns per capita to 30.
The school shooting club thing is an example of how regulation works.
Just as you don’t see soldiers on military bases walking around with guns on their hips for fun, there were strict rules around high school shooting ranges - kids didn’t take guns home and had strict protocols around handling, etc.
The big difference now is you have a fetishization of guns combined with a low intensity insurgency. If you ask a more prolific gun person about why they are collecting weapons, the answer in 1965 was likely to be about antique or other technical factors. In 1995 they were worried about Clinton taking the guns away, so buy before it’s too late. In 2015, many are talking about fighting the government.
Marginal personalities are attracted to the power of weapons and attention.
A few decades ago it was actually somewhat common for students at rural high schools to bring guns from home so that they could go hunting after school. That didn't seem to cause any problems.
Most recent mass shooters have acted for personal reasons. They were not insurgents fighting the government.
I grew up in the midwest, where pheasant hunting was (and still is) popular. Many people had gun racks in their cars, and often parked with the guns in plain sight.
We had little crime and very few incidents of gun violence.
The problem with a lot of anti-gun measures is that the proponents readily admit that they would not have stopped any particular shooter. For instance, people talk about background checks, but this shooter and many others did not have a history and were not known to police. They would have passes a background check.
Often times the person acquiring the gun already broke a number of gun laws. Either straw purchase, borrowed someones gun, carrying across state lines, etc. So throwing more laws at it won't necessarily help. Enforcement of existing laws could help but is obviously difficult. Not to mention that gun violence is much higher in cities/counties/states with the most gun control measures. You can say that they just get the guns from elsewhere and national restrictions need to be imposed, but we should see SOME effect. Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan.
So the conversation from anti-gun people basically amounts to less guns everywhere, but that genie might be out of the bottle already. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US and it would be impractical to seize even a tiny percent of them.
But note that there were always guns in America. In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.
https://nypost.com/2018/03/31/when-toting-guns-in-high-schoo...