Some more idle thoughts on this subject. I play golf with a few Brits and Canadians. Two things they agree on are they wouldn't change their health care system for ours, nor their gun laws for ours.
Also, regarding suicides. You have to wonder how many wouldn't go thru with it except for the fact they had a gun in their house.
Here's how crazy the gun laws have become. Here in Florida a doctor cannot ask a patient if they have a gun in their home.
The gun lobby has a strangle hold on this country and we're the worst off for it. It's all about selling more guns. As if one for every 300 plus million of us isn't enough.
Australia had a gun massacre 21 years ago and changed their gun laws after and have seen a dramatic drop in gun deaths.
Bottom line again, nothing will change. We're steeped in gun culture. Not Presidents being assassinated, not the high number of gun deaths each year (suicide, accident, and murders) and not these all to common gun massacres.
I did hear where one of the musicians at the concert changed his mind regarding guns. He and his band mates were all pro gun and had guns on the tour bus. He now realizes they'd have no chance against the arsenal of weaponry the shooter had. You never hear of someone changing their mind in the gun debate, but he did.
Even if we finally woke up one day as country and said enough is a enough, there's too many guns out there. Don't know how we'd ever get them off the streets.
As evidenced by all the posts in this thread with all the parsing, number jumbling and justifying etc., we're pretty far away from any meaningful change.
And with the billionaire Archie Bunker in the Whitehouse and a Congress owned by the gun lobby we'll stay on the course we're on. And we can all meet here again when the next massacre happens and engage in another fruitless debate on what can be done to change things for the better.