There have been no mass shooting events since the gun law was passed.
Now they can concern themselves with other shootings since they have solved the first problem.
Actually, there's been a few. I suppose it depends if you only call it a mass shooting if more than 3 people get shot in one incident.
But the gun homicides that have been going on for ages, the gun laws as restrictive as they are have done really nothing to change.
Many of the countries that have enacted strong gun laws were already low on gun crime and declining over the last few decades.
This is roughly akin to the drop in violent crime over decades here in the U.S.
You would THINK if you severely curtail the ability of people to own and use guns, the homicide rate wouldn't just go down -
it should approach ZERO. It hasn't, because of something the guy in Sutherland Springs observed - a person who intends to KILL people
isn't going to be slowed down by the fact that he can't get a gun LEGALLY. It would be like making very slow speed limits in those areas
where people are being mowed down by cars - if you're going to kill people with your car, the speed limit won't do anything.
There's at least one other point of comparison that's overlooked here - besides the point that the Port Arthur massacre was an outlier in the history of Australia.
When you add up the gun deaths from mass shootings in the U.S. and place them next to the number simply killed by guns, there's no comparison.
The latter is HUGE in comparison. Secondly, we narrowly define "mass shooting" as multiple deaths by a single - or possibly two - identifiable gunman where
there are any number of casualties all in a minute. We do NOT count a night-time barrage of bullets by a gang spraying neighborhoods with guns on a nightly
basis. Ten people killed in a school or church? Horrendous. Ten people killed one evening in a major city by gangs - possibly the same persons and NONE of
them caught? We get YAWNS. The news doesn't call it a mass shooting. Even though it happens in the same general geography.
Now that may be a matter of defining things. For example, I have relatives who would have called all of the recent shootings "terrorism".
No. They're not. A terrorist has a purpose, an agenda - and an identifiable group to communicate their idea.
The guy who blew up the lunch counter where my Dad went to eat in England years ago -
he was part of the IRA. And he had a mission. (My Dad survived). The 9/11 attackers - a mission. Suicide bombers - a mission.
A nut shooting people he hates - not terrorism. Dangerous. But not terrorism.
Similarly - a "mass shooting" as we see it in the news doesn't differ greatly from the results in our cities.
As many as a dozen killed in a large city in a given night, and some of them by the same people or same groups.
We don't call them mass killings. (Oddly enough, some countries don't define HOMICIDE the way we do. In countries like Japan, if a father slaughters his family and then himself, it is called a mass suicide. Similar for some events in Europe where unsolved gun deaths might be ruled suicide).
Ok - this has been long - but right now, we have thousands killed in gun homicides and dozens in mass shootings.
The former seems to be a much greater problem and gun laws don't do anything.
Nor do they appear to do anything elsewhere. Moreover, our current gun laws would not have stopped any of the recent shootings.
But men armed with guns - DID.
