The focus on Mass Shootings is understandable, but not optimal policy
Shooting twenty people gets way more than 20 times the attention that shooting one person does. But in any large metropolitan area there are certain stories that repeat several times a week.
Estranged husband shoots wife then commits suicide.
Man at night club shoots man at night club.
Robber shoots convenience store worker for no apparent reason (killing the witness while on security camera is less than fool proof.)
And... this is a big one... person shoots himself because of how he feels at the moment... despite the fact that he would surely feel differently in the future if there was a future.
The day before the CT shooting some friends were holding a shocked informal wake for a seemingly happy young man who shot himself in a hospital parking lot... after calling the ER to tell them where he was in the parking lot, and to tell them that he was an organ donor. I doubt he was a gun nut. He had *a* gun.
The television "event' shooting is a powerful catalyst for gun control, but it does not follow that sensible gun control is about avoiding sensational TV event shootings.
In the 1970s gun control focused on the "Saturday Night Special"... the inexpensive handgun. This was because most murders were committed with inexpensive handguns.
And they still are.
Restoring the AWB is fine... as public policy it is no worse than harmless. But we, as a nation, ought to be thinking about some sort of real policy about the real problem.
During the 2002 'beltway sniper' rampage I once told a group of people waiting to break cover and run for their cars "don't bunch up"... like a trip to CVS was landing on D-Day. (But if they were right to be afraid then they would have been right to not bunch up)
So I am not unfamiliar with fear of an M-16 variant. (One of the sniper victims was shot standing in what I thought of as 'my' parking space... the place I always tried to park at a store I went to frequently.)
But some of the suburban women terrified to cross that parking lot had much more to fear from their husband's handgun than from a sniper's high-velocity rifle, in practical terms. And, of course, her children were likelier to shoot themselves or a sibling with the family handgun than to be shot by someone else.
There is a Nancy Grace quality to all of this. These mass shootings are the "missing pretty blond girls" of gun violence. They are good TV.
But at the end of the day, there are thousands of people being shot by unexceptional handguns.
And the wing-nut arsenal is not the heart of the problem, as real policy. The upper class NRA member is not a notable threat to public safety except in how he votes and who he donates money to. And the 'enthusiast' with ten guns is primarily a threat when those ten guns get stolen and sold off on the street.
Ten people with one gun are a lot more of a problem than one person with ten guns.
The heart of the problem, if the problem is gun violence rather than telegenic gun violence, is the one handgun that almost everyone seems to have.
It is a deep problem. It is lousy TV. It does not lend itself to lazy solutions.
Any non-symbolic reduction in the gun problem will involve a substantial reduction in the number of guns that are used to shoot people.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Yet shoes get lots of attention at airports. Public relations is not safety. 
--imm
I mean, if they can ban all the guns, are the problems that people deal with mitigated? Will it stop murders, and more particularly, suicides? 
--imm
