Hexen]Our motive for having more liberal gun laws than the rest of the western world has nothing to do with safety issues so that's not a very productive way to approach this issue. This is going to sound cold, but these mass shootings are a fad among the criminally insane fitting our current culture of attention whoring in an impersonal society. Draconian federal gun laws might modestly diminish the bodycount, but this shit is going to happen anyway. Kids are killing their parents and friends with knives to attract Slenderman, so I find it naive to assume guns have anything to do with the root cause. This stuff also presents such blatantly obvious constitutional issues that I'm not sure it's even practical to consider.
The thing that strikes me the most about this issue is how baffling all of the proposed solutions are. I hear people say shit like "ban assault weapons" which is laughable to anyone who knows anything about guns. I hear "blah blah federal gun registry" which is an almost childlike statement when there's hundreds of millions of guns in a country with porous borders, and the fact that semi-autos are basically 19th century tech you could whip up in your garage if you had to. And finally the "keep guns out of the hands of criminals and in the hands of responsible blah blah blah", which relies on the hilariously simplistic assumption that someone willing to commit mass murder is unwilling to commit peripheral crimes.
As far as I'm concerned, the only things any of these attempted gun bans will accomplish is to create another epidemic of black market trafficking and increase the magnitude of damage caused by existing trafficking rings like the drug war has done. I think it's pretty well established that more guns means a higher bodycount in most urban areas, and a lower bodycount in rural areas with benign gun cultures. I think our current state-based gun legislation is just fine. The problem is we have a shitty society.
