The Answers to Mass Shootings Won’t be Legislation

In this job, I’ve had to focus on a number of massacres that involved firearms. I still have some low-level trauma from the Route 91 shooting, and I wasn’t even there, but I had to focus on it so much that it’s left a mark on me. Anytime there’s another, I cringe. I cringe because it reminds me of losing a friend to such a shooting, and I cringe because I know what’s coming.

I truly feel for everyone who has been impacted by these incidents. Contrary to what many might believe, I actually do want to put an end to these things. I’ve already lost one dear friend to this madness. I’d rather not lose anyone else.

And as noted over at the Washington Examiner, we’re not going to legislate our way out of this.

Washington Examiner Senior Writer David Harsanyi recently dissected the legacy media’s game on mass shooting coverage, writing, “If the perpetrator’s motivations are even tenuously tied to right-wing ideology, coverage will focus on the dangers of rhetoric coming from Republicans. If not … the conversation will focus on the lack of gun control, a problem that’s also the fault of Republicans.”

And since the Annunciation Catholic School shooter in Minneapolis actively identified with left-wing politics, the legacy media, in coordination with Democratic officials, have instigated yet another national conversation on “gun violence.” 

…

High-ranking Democratic officials do little to tamp down this expectation among their voters, framing commonsense gun control proposals, such as universal background checks, red flag and safe storage laws, waiting periods, and high-capacity magazine limits, as a cure-all despite many of these already being in effect in states and municipalities across the nation. 

To be sure, these measures are not unreasonable — and in fact, I support them all to the extent that they remain constitutional. But there is little evidence to suggest that they would end or even reduce the instances of mass shootings. 

Even studies that purport to show a connection between enacting gun laws and reducing mass shootings are weak at best. For instance, a 2024 study from Northwestern Medicine found that a federal ban on “assault weapons” could have prevented 38 mass shootings between 2005 and 2022. But that’s a tiny drop in a very large bucket. A 2023 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found there had been 4,011 mass shootings in the United States between 2014 and 2022 alone. It’s impossible to say definitively that a ban would have actually stopped 38 because it’s possible the killers could have circumvented the system and gotten their hands on one of the nation’s millions of untraceable guns on the black market.

If nothing else, mass shooters exhibit an obsession with carrying out their attacks. Even if guns could be magically waved away, what’s to say they wouldn’t move on to other means, such as explosives? 

Now, I don’t actually support any of those because none of those measures are constitutional, but that’s beside the point.

The writer, Peter Laffin, hits the nail on the head in the last quoted paragraph. The worst school massacre in American history wasn’t a mass shooting. It involved a farmer who used dynamite. In total, 44 people were killed in the Bath School Massacre, and there wasn’t a firearm involved.

If we could make guns vanish overnight, you’re not going to stop the murderous impulse to kill tons of people. We’ve seen mass stabbings, for example, and while some say the death toll is nowhere near as bad as if a gun were involved, we have to remember that not every so-called mass shooting has a high body count. We can’t make that assumption.

Yet gun-focused legislation is where all the attention goes. As Harsanyi noted, when they can blame it on the right, the problem is rhetoric. When they can’t, the problem is access to guns, all while ignoring that there’s a whole lot more going on.

We can find a solution to these horrific incidents. There has to be one because these haven’t always been with us in the numbers we currently see. Something set this crap off, and something can be done to put an end to it. We just don’t know what exactly that is.

What we do know is that guns aren’t the issue. It’s a human problem, and that’s got to be addressed. Fumbling around making this about politics and things anti-gunners wanted all along, even before mass shootings were a significant thing, isn’t going to solve the issue.

At best, it’ll just kick the can down the road a bit as would-be killers figure out something else.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I’d feel better than if my friend or family member was killed in a bombing rather than a mass shooting. Just sayin’.

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