Mass shootings are one of the big issues that anti-2A activists use to try to suppress gun rights. And, of course, mass shootings are horrible events that any and all sane people want to see minimized and (if it were possible) eliminated completely.
Here’s the thing: anti-2A activists go after the goal of reducing acts of violence, especially mass shootings, in a way that doesn’t address the issue.
If you doubt that statement, just think back to the acts of violence in New Orleans and Las Vegas on New Year’s Day this year. The Las Vegas attack was a bomb, and in the New Orleans attack, a pickup truck was the primary “weapon.”
So, the weapon isn’t the issue in mass killing situations; the person, the attacker is.
So banning guns doesn’t help because it isn’t the actual underlying problem in mass shootings.
Instead, anti-2A activists focus on disarming law abiding citizens who could use guns for self-defense, and those same activists focus on creating areas that are targets for mass shooters.
Oh, they don’t call them that. They call them “gun free zones.” But the data show that they are target zones for people who want to shoot as many people as possible.
If you think that I’m making up that information, the Crime Prevention Research Center has the data to prove it. An article at their site notes,
82.8 percent of the attacks since 1998 and 94 percent since 1950 have occurred in places where guns are banned. For those who read these murderers’ diaries or manifestos, these numbers aren’t too surprising. These mass murderers plan their attacks long in advance (at least six months). Their goal is to get media attention, and they know that the more people they kill, the more media attention they get. They know if they attack a place where people can’t defend themselves, they will be able to kill more people.
So, the data shows that more than 4 out of every 5 mass shootings happen where guns are banned (in other words, they happen in gun free zones).
So, it makes sense that one of the first steps to reduce mass shootings is to stop creating places where people are easy targets.
Get rid of gun free zones.
Will that eliminate mass shootings? Of course not.
What it will do, though, is make it more difficult for mass shooters to take advantage of the circumstances that they’re looking for: areas where they can kill a lot of people before they themselves are killed, thus giving themselves infamy and media attention.
Eliminate the opportunity to easily kill so many people in one place (by no longer artificially creating places where there aren’t law abiding citizens to shoot back), and you’ve already made it more difficult for a would-be mass shooter to kill enough people to generate posthumous fame.
If their purpose is to gain fame through killing and they can’t get that by targeting schools and other gun free zones, then, you’ve taken away the would-be shooter’s incentive to commit that shooting in the first place.
It’s not a hard concept to understand, if you’re actually looking for real solutions instead of pushing a political agenda.
Which makes you wonder what anti-2A activists are really trying to do.
