And in America, guns are quite easy to get.

The problem is that it's nearly impossible to identify those future murderers before the fact.

The smartest strategy is probably to make guns readily accessible to anyone who wants them and then hope that it'll all work itself out, the way we've been doing for decades.

somehow crack down on "black market" weapon sales. It's rare for a common criminal to legally purchase
a hand gun through the legal methods. As far as the "lone nut" killer is concerned, I don't have an answer.

I'd like to see a stronger requirement for gun owners to keep track of their guns at all times, to prevent the theft or misuse of those guns.

This will do nothing to deter the "lone nut" who legally owns firearms and subsequently snaps, of course, but perhaps it would help reduce the flow of guns into the black market.

Like many other shooters, Dalton was a 'law abiding gun owner' before he decided to use his toy against innocent people. There was no reason for anyone to deny him the ability to purchase that gun.

He used a regular handgun and not the kind of assault rifle everyone always focuses on.

The exact Michigan laws regarding having a gun in your car don't matter one bit because even outlawing transporting a firearm in a vehicle wouldn't have physically prevented Dalton from driving his toy around in his car.

Unfortunately this means the only way to make a positive change is not 'common sense gun legislation' but to either have nobody have a gun or have everybody have a gun. The gun nuts think the best way to deal with gun violence is more gun violence, by arming everyone, because in their fantasy world people like Dalton would be shot and killed as soon as they tried to go on a shooting spree.

And the anti-gun nuts think that disarming everyone is the answer, because in their fantasy world nobody gets shot or killed when guns are outlawed.

France proves that to be a deadly illusion of safety.

If firearm ownership translated into a safer society, we'd have the safest society on the planet. Yet while the US might not be Syria or even parts of Mexico, our crime rates and especially our gun crime rates are much higher than places like Canada, Europe, and Japan, where firearm ownership is extremely limited.

Beyond that, there are also certain practical considerations. There are too many people with no interest in arming themselves to ever fulfill that fantasy of armed criminals getting shot on sight. Even many people who have carry permits and who carry on a regular basis are less interested in being the good guy with a gun and more in defending themselves if they're confronted directly. What if they hear shooting around the corner? They won't confront the shooter, they'll head the other way.

..which might not be a bad thing, because imagine a dozen good guys with guns trying to respond to a shooting. How do they know who is the bad guy and who are the good guys? How can law enforcement make that distinction?

Paris and Oslo (Anders Breivik) are a good example of how even tough gun laws do not keep everyone perfectly safe from crime, but nevertheless, in general you are much less likely to get shot and killed in France or Norway than in the US. Despite our much higher rate of firearm ownership. Or perhaps exactly because our much higher rate of gun ownership.

Having said all that, even if private firearm ownership were outlawed completely tomorrow, I know there's no practical way of collecting all those guns. Kicking down doors and searching houses from top to bottom is not something I'd ever want to see here, no matter how much I think banning guns is the best way; furthermore, even if law enforcement were to go that far, the people most interested in using their guns for mischief would be the ones trying the hardest to hide their guns and keep them.

Family man. Wife, kids, job selling insurance. Good neighbor. No criminal record.

What causes a guy like this to just snap and start murdering innocent strangers? That's the real story here.

It's possible he had mental illness and they had no idea. Or possible something happened to him recently that set him off.

...

Say the tools who like guns every time something like this happens.

Which makes me wonder why the guy didn't go on a rampage with a monkey wrench...

At least that’s what the NRA tells us. Fuck you NRA.