Mass shootings are always tough to respond to. Especially this one, because someone, for reasons I can’t even fathom, went into a center for the developmentally challenged and started shooting. Good God, what does one say to that? Obviously my prayers go out to the people dealing with this tragedy, but apparently prayers are political now too, what isn’t? With the over-politicized climate in our country and the West, in general, there is a huge push to instantly make this about politics. You see uncontroversial while the other side is considered cold, heartless, and only out to win a political fight. So it is difficult for me to respond to the misinformation and outright lies of the people who are playing on your emotions in order to get you to support a particular policy, but that is what I will venture to do.

Let me begin by breaking some illusions. America does not have a gun problem and we do not have a problem with mass shootings. According to the New York Times, 462 people have been killed from mass shootings in 2015 in the United States and according to the FBI uniform crime report in 2014, their most recent data, 8,124 people were killed by guns in general in the US. Meaning that mass shootings make up 5.7 percent of the overall gun deaths in this country. No matter what the media tries to tell you, gun violence is on the decline and has been since the 1990’s. No amount of media coverage is going to change the fact that this country is getting less violent. And it has been getting less and less violent, even as people on the Left talk about how anyone and everyone can get a gun.

Well, it appears that maybe people want guns to defend themselves because they certainly aren’t using them to kill more people. This is a great thing to me. I like seeing our society get less violent, but I don’t want to take your guns as many on the Left do. You see, they can’t bring up the facts that I just cited because then they would lose the argument. So if you are going convince someone to give away their Constitutional rights and liberties without facts, then you have to scare them, you have to make them terrified. It is what the Bush administration did after 9/11 -- make people so terrified that they give up their Fourth Amendment rights to having their property and person protected against “unreasonable searches and seizures” and their right to a probable cause warrant. They were able to make the American people so terrified that they gave up one of the cornerstones of American Liberty and now the Left is trying to make you so terrified that you give up your Second Amendment rights.

How else can I put that? The rates of gun violence are going down and the guns they want to ban cause a very small amount of gun deaths, they are distorting reality so that they can make you afraid and get you to give up your rights. But what do statistics actually count for in the face of tragedy? He probably didn’t say it but Stalin was supposed to have said “When one man dies, it’s a tragedy. When thousands die it’s a statistic.” Or some version of that. When the media covers enough of these tragedies then they begin to feel like they equal up to statistics and facts, even when they don’t.

I care less about limiting the number of mass shootings and more about limiting death and suffering no matter how it happens. If the 14 who have been killed in this shooting had died separately from getting shot in their own homes, would it be any less tragic? No, we would still have 14 innocent people dead. But would we be having a national discussion about people killed in their own homes? Nope. So we, as a nation, don’t really care about the actual deaths. We care about where the deaths happen in public. You see, we go in public, therefore we can see ourselves as being the possible victims of these mass shootings. That is the truth, that is why the deaths of people in public mass shootings matter more to us than the deaths of people who get murdered in their own homes.

Some of the policies proposed after this mass shooting are pretty much the same policies proposed after every mass shooting. Universal Background checks, assault weapons ban, limiting the number of bullets in a magazine, and some have even said that they want to get rid of the second amendment. So, let us deal with each of these policy proposals logically and rationally.

OK, so to the first one, background checks. Background checks are checks on people’s criminal records when they go to purchase a gun at a registered gun store and if that check shows that someone has a past criminal record, especially a past record of violent crime, then they can be denied the ability to buy a gun in that state. Different laws have different background check laws and guns shows don’t have to administer background checks if they don’t want to because they are not registered gun stores. You also don’t need to get a background check if you are buying a gun from a private seller. There are any number of websites that are legal on the Internet, where one could email someone who is trying to sell their gun, meet up with them, and have the gun in their hands by the end of the weekend without any need for a background check. Now you could make it illegal for people to privately sell their guns to one another but boy hasn’t that worked for our policy on marijuana. I mean it seems to have worked perfectly because we have banned people from privately selling that plant to one another and wouldn’t you know it, no one in this country is using marijuana. Also, if you didn’t know, there are about 300 million guns in this country and those guns aren’t going away. The only policy that will decrease the number of those guns is door-to-door gun confiscation which would start a second civil war in this country, so many keep that one on the back burner. So no matter what, no matter what policies are proposed or laws passed, tomorrow, next year, or ten years from now, there will still be 300 million guns in this country and that number is growing as I write this sentence.

To me, that is a fantastic thing. It means that any attempt by the government to further control the lives of its citizens is going to be difficult to carry out. It means that the citizens don’t have to be dependent on the justice that the government may or may not give out. The first gun control laws in this country were to make sure that black people, slave and free, were not allowed to own guns, which were great pieces of gun control legislation because it meant that the Klan could brutalize black people and black people weren’t able to respond. Oh wait, maybe that was a bad thing. Maybe black people couldn’t trust their government to protect them and instead needed firearms to protect themselves? Nah, you have to be a Tea Party member to believe that you would ever need guns to protect yourself against a neglectful or oppressive government. Those who are slaves or considered lower have always been the first to be denied access to firearms and/or weapons. The sign of a free person throughout history was a person who was able to own weapons.

But that is an issue for another time. My point is that there are around 90 million gun owners in this country and around 300 million firearms . Any regulation in the supply of guns is only going to drive the demand for guns up, meaning that if you banned the further sale of firearms you would probably end up with about 150 million people owning the 300 guns in this country because the monetary benefit of keeping multiple guns would go down the more that people are willing to pay for them. Ironically, the more you regulate guns, the higher the amount of people that will have them, outside of a door to door gun confiscation. You could enforce background checks, but those who don’t pass them will still be able to get a gun, they can contact a private seller and get a gun within a few days.

Next is the policy of the Assault Weapons Ban. There are a number of problems with this policy, first, there is no such thing as an assault weapon, it was a term created by the federal government and not something that the gun community has ever used. So-called “assault weapons” are classified by cosmetic features like "pistol grips" and "detachable magazines" that happen to make the gun look scarier but don’t actually have anything to do with the deadliness or power of the firearm. For instance, in a firefight, often times the most effective weapon that you can have is a shotgun. Shotguns are deadly, they spray out huge amounts of shrapnel and you don’t have to be a good shot in order to hit someone.

But no proponent of gun control in the United States, as far as I know, has ever proposed specifically banning shotguns. The decision to ban AR-15s, or other assault weapons like it, would be completely arbitrary. They don’t kill more people than other guns, in fact, the number of people that they kill is so small that the FBI doesn’t even report it as its own category. The FBI releases its annual crime statistic, in which it lists how many people were killed and what they were killed within any given year. In 2014, the number of people killed by fire arms in total was 8,124. The number of people killed by handguns was 5,562 and the number of people killed by Rifles of any sort, including the dreaded military-style assault rifles, was 248. So to be generous to the advocates of banning assault rifles, we will say for the sake of argument that all of the rifle deaths were from assault rifles.

Even if that were true, which it isn’t, assault rifles would still only account for 3 percent of the overall gun deaths. To give you a sense of just how few people die from an assault rifle, 341 people die from “Drowning and submersion while in or falling into a bath-tub” every year. That darn bath-tub lobby keeps it going, though. When is Congress going to stand up to the BMA, the Bathroom Manufacturers Association, and their bath-tubs that kill even more people than assault rifles?

My point is that the policy against assault rifles is based entirely on emotion and fear and has no basis in logic or statistical fact. In fact, most of our biggest fears don’t have much basis in logic or statistical fact. I am certain that I will hear many of my fellow conservatives come out in the next few days and demand that we need new surveillance legislation to fight and deal with terrorism because this attack appears to have been politically motivated by political Islam, specifically the Islamic State ideology. The truth is, we need don’t need new legislation to deal with terrorism. We have done a pretty good job with terrorism thus far. Since 9/11 we haven’t had a single terrorist attack that even comes close to the level of destruction that happened on that day. Our intelligence agencies are doing a pretty good job on this, we have only had the Boston Bombing and this attack in San Bernardino that could even qualify as mass terrorist attacks. Not bad. But the fear of many Americans, which isn’t based in logic, may push our Congress to pass new surveillance measures, even when they are not needed.

I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, so I will hit the next policies proposals and do so quickly. The high capacity magazine policy is one that is often proposed. So, some basic terminology here is needed. A magazine is the part of the gun that holds the bullets, it is also sometimes called a clip. The proposal, as far as I know it, is to limit the number of bullets that a magazine can hold to 10 bullets, some proposals put a higher number and some a lower number. This policy might have been effective in the 1950’s when how you go gun magazines was almost funneled through your local gun shop, but we live in a very different world now. With the proliferation of 3D printing, people can print their own gun magazines and they can print their guns. But the magazines are incredibly easy to print because a gun magazine is just a hollowed out case that is big enough to carry bullets and fits into the lower part of the gun. All you would have to do is scan the magazine that you currently have and then start making multiple 3D printed magazines.

We are getting to the point with our technology that it will be very possible in the next 10 years to make thousands or hundreds of thousands of completely untraceable, whole guns. So the proposition to limit “high capacity” magazines is one that is made ridiculous by modern technology. And finally, the most radical policy other than gun confiscation, is the idea of banning the selling or purchase of guns. This hasn't been heavily pushed by gun control advocates, other than in Europe where the citizens didn't have very many guns to begin with. Banning all guns wouldn’t work because of what I have mentioned before because you will still have 300 million guns in this country and the people who had multiple guns would just sell them to the people who had no guns but wanted them after a ban went into effect. All of the gun control policies proposed are all based on the past, on past ideas of what would make American safe. None of them have a strong basis in the current reality that we are in.

I want to deal with one last issue that is almost always brought up by the Left in the wake of mass shootings which is that, as President Obama put it after the Charleston shooting, “This type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries”. The basic idea being that America is separate and alone in its problem with mass gun violence and that thus we should change our gun policy to align itself with the policies of “other advanced countries."

Well on the first account, the President is simply incorrect. According to the Guardian, a left-leaning British Newspaper, our neighbor to the south, Mexico, where guns are completely illegal, has a gun murder rate at 9.97 deaths per 100,000 people. This is compared with the United States that has a gun murder rate at 2.97 deaths per 100,000 people. Now, for whatever reason, you might not think of Mexico as an advanced nation, I don’t why because it is an advanced nation, but a few more examples might be necessary. Brazil, one of the most if not the most advanced nation in Latin America, has a gun murder rate of 18.1 deaths per 100,000 people, which is six times the murder rate of the United States. Brazil also has much stricter gun laws than the U.S., they ban the private sale of gun and make it mandatory that you register your gun with the government. South Africa, a modern nation by any standard, has a gun murder rate of 17.03 deaths per 100,000 people and in South Africa you have to have a “license, permit, or authorization” from the government in order to be able to own a gun. All of these countries have much stricter guns laws than the United States but have much higher gun murder rates than the United States and all are advanced nations.

In conclusion, all of the measures that are proposed in the wake of mass shootings that would be meant to limit mass shootings logically will not work and second, there are several countries that have more strict gun regulations than us but have higher gun murder rates. The rhetoric used by the advocates of gun control is not meant to appeal to your reason or logical abilities. Their rhetoric is meant to appeal to your emotion and your fear, meant to play on your natural fear of death by telling you that the whole country is constantly getting shot up but never mentioning facts or statistics. Be wary of this, for when someone is getting your to react to something out of fear and emotion, they can get you to do things that you otherwise wouldn’t. Take a note from the British, “Keep calm and carry on,” have a stiff upper lip, and think when others tell you to feel.