The Mass Shootings Where Stricter Gun
Laws Might Have Made a Difference
If the key gun control proposals now being considered in Congress had been law since 1999, four gunmen younger than 21 would have been blocked from legally buying the rifles they used in mass shootings.
At least four other assailants would have been subject to a required background check, instead of slipping through a loophole. Ten might have been unable to steal their weapons because of efforts to require or encourage safer gun storage. And 20 might not have been allowed to legally purchase the large-capacity magazines that they used to upgrade their guns, helping them kill, on average, 16 people each.
Taken together, those four measures might have changed the course of at least 35 mass shootings — a third of such episodes in the United States since the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, a New York Times analysis has found. Those 35 shootings killed a combined 446 people.It really does highlight the stupidity of not enacting basic laws. Or even discussing them. This clearly lays out the possible benefits and lives that could have been saved.But in a nation awash with guns, the majority of mass killings might have been unaffected — either because assailants obtained their guns illegally or because they were older adults using weapons that wouldn’t have been subject to any proposed restrictions.
Another proposed measure, a ban on the sale of military-style semiautomatic guns known as assault weapons, could in theory have had greater impact. But it faces even tougher opposition than the other proposals. Congress banned the sale of such guns in 1994, but the law expired 10 years later, and the weapons have since surged in popularity. Weapons covered under the expired ban were used in 30 percent of the shootings in the data, causing nearly 400 deaths. In a speech Thursday, President Biden asked Congress to renew the ban.
And none of these laws is taking away people's rights to protect their homes or go hunt legally. The assault weapons ban would piss people off but who cares there is no reason those are needed to hunt any animal its ridiculous. They like them because they are "cool". Thats it.