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Originally Posted by chezlaw
You yourself say Americans are more likely to shoot people. That's a good argument for gun control in america. Doesn't matter that it would be pointless in Japan because they don't kill people.
Japan does matter. More to the point, Canada matters. These societies, Japan in theory and Canada in practice, show that the availability of guns is not a sufficient condition for the outcome of mass shootings. We are trying to stop something from happening and so we need to know the cause.
You might say the cause is a two part condition, crazy Americans and the availability of guns and so if we cut off part two then we win. But a problem emerges quickly. The very apparent constraint that we can't ban all guns means that we will have to define qualifications for gun ownership which deny mass shooters access to guns while letting others buy them.
How? If there was some huge overlap between hardened criminality and mass shootings then sure, no felons can have guns- problem solved. But that's not the reality, which is that these mass shooters would almost always slip through any reasonable qualifications barrier. They have no felonies. They don't have a mark on their foreheads. They don't have profiles which both indicate their likelihood of committing a mass shooting and are socially unacceptable, and that would be a requirement for disqualifying them.
Let's say instead of mass shootings, people started copycatting the European terrorists and ramming people with cars. What restrictions on driver's licensees do you think would be effective there?