twelve questions to consider in the face of mass shootings. hint, it ain't the gun that goes out the door, and it ain't the gun that aims and shoots itself;

To prevent more mass shootings, many demand more gun control laws. But do these laws prevent such massacres or address their root causes? Here are 12 questions to ponder.

First, why do almost all U.S. mass shootings occur in “gun-free zones”? Indeed, it’s hard to name any that have not. The 2015 Charleston mass-murderer apparently targeted a church instead of a school partly because the school had security – but South Carolina banned guns in church. Would any of us put a sign in our yard saying, “This is a gun-free home”?

Second, can an evil person using a gun to murder be stopped by anyone other than a good person using a gun? In the December, 2019 Texas church shooting, the murderer was prevented from murdering many times more than his two victims by a good parishioner with a gun who shot him in six seconds. Many other mass murders have been similarly stopped.

Third, with all the many thousands of city, county, state, and federal gun control laws we’ve had for many decades, how realistic is it that any new ones will make a difference? Very few guns used in crime are ever legally bought since, by definition, criminals don’t obey laws.

Fourth, for those who want to ban entire classes of guns, how well did America’s prohibition of alcohol from 1920 to 1933 prevent Americans from getting booze? Even with a constitutional amendment and an unprecedented national effort to completely ban the sale of this dangerous drug, “the noble crusade” was an abject failure that corrupted law enforcement on a massive scale. By far the biggest beneficiaries of prohibition were bootleggers made fabulously wealthy like Al Capone who said, “All I do is supply a demand.”
Fifth, how well has our war on drugs prevented people from getting them? This 52-year effort has spent a trillion-plus tax dollars stopping record amounts of drugs at the border and creating by far the world’s biggest prison population. Yet illegal drugs remain plentiful and widely used.......read more.......