A couple of years ago I answered a question over at Quora: Why did the Gun Control Act of 1968 fail to solve the issue of mass shootings?
In light of recent events, I thought I’d share my answer:
Mathematics.
Because a mass shooting requires only three things: A gun, someone willing to acquire, load, point and shoot the gun, and a group of three or more people other than the shooter.
There are, by several estimates, something between 300,000,000 and 500,000,000 guns currently in private hands in the United States. We have population in excess of 330,000,000 people. If 0.001% of that population meets criteria #2, they can get criteria #1. Every single day you’re probably part of criteria #3.
You’re looking at 3,300 potential shooters based on that off-the-cuff estimate.
Welcome to reality. Life is not safe.
I stand by something I have said at Quora, among other places:
Do leftists have a viable plan to reduce gun violence? Well do they?
Look up any list of the worst weapons made in prison. Half or more of those weapons will be guns.
Made by hand, from scratch, by people *under close surveillance to prevent them from doing precisely that.*
When you figure out how to keep the weapons out of the hands of the violent, then *maybe* we’ll listen to your ideas about disarming everybody else.
But so far, your solution to the violent ones is to let them back out on the street. So the mass killings *are actually on you.*
I’m one of the only people I know who is only rarely part of criteria #3. Comes of being a trucker.
Any the only solution the progressivists will propose or accept is to imprison all of society in a panopticon built to their values and priorities.
That’s because leftists define “freedom” as “freedom to agree with their dogma in every tiniest particular.”