Mass Shootings and Magical Thinking

Like clockwork, a shooting happens and there's a demand to ban "military grade" assault weapons. If only these guns weren't available, then no one would ever be harmed again.

This is magical thinking. It assumes that inanimate objects somehow entice people to violence and that they would be peaceful without these totems at hand. Let's look at some facts.

First, all of these mass killings are really copy cat crimes stemming from Columbine. We had occasional mass murders before that but it's become increasingly common since Columbine. With each killing there is days of news coverage. This convinces unhappy individuals that they can go out in a blaze of glory.

Second, the use of guns and specifically assault weapons is accidental but feeds into the copycat nature of these acts.

The Columbine killers did not plan on shooting their way into the school then killing each other. Their plan was much, much worse. They planted a bomb based on a propane tank in the lunch room. It was timed to go off when the lunch room had the most people in it and there was a good chance that it would have also killed the people in the library above the cafeteria. The guns and pipe bombs were for killing the people who survived the bomb. When the bomb failed, they entered the school, shooting people along the way and tried to detonate the bomb by hand. When that failed, they killed each other. If they had succeeded then we'd be having school bombings instead of shootings.

The so-called assault weapon was banned for a while but the ban was allowed to expire because this class of gun is almost never used in crimes. Assault weapons are a subset of rifles and more people are killed with knives than with all rifles put together.

The assault weapon was another accident. This one came from Sandy Hook. The killer there wasn't able to buy guns but his mother was an avid shooter. He killed her then used her gun to massacre children in a school. Before that, most mass shootings were with pistols. A pistol is a better weapon for this. It is easier to conceal, you can easily carry more than one, and they are easier to aim in close quarters. But the Sandy Hook shooter used a Bushmaster AK-47 and the news reported it as the gun of choice for mass murderers.

Note - the Las Vegas shooter was an unusual one. He was shooting into a crowd from a building. The bump stock he used would be worthless in any other situation.

So, disturbed people do copy cat crimes using copycat methods. But there's any number of ways for an evil person to kill people. Bombs are fairly easy to make. Simply setting fires can be deadly. Attacks in Europe have shown that a large truck can be more deadly than a gun.

So far, the mass killers have been copying each other instead of copying terrorists but there's no guarantee that will continue. In the meantime, blaming the gun instead of the person behind it is an exercise in futility.