That's a lame argument though. We don't have to only focus on the cause to make policies that help alleviate a problem. For example tens of thousands of people die each year in traffic collisions. It's not necessary for us to only "address the cause" of why people tend to crash into one another. We can also focus on mitigating harm. Doing this with vehicles has worked. Because we now require licences to drive, enforce speed limits, drunk driving laws, seatbelts, and airbags in cars, the number of fatalities has fallen to far less than half of what it was decades ago before these policies. Naturally the problems (and root causes) of road/vehicle danger still exist, but over 20,000 fewer Americans die each year compared to before these policies.
It's not a lame argument at all.
To reduce road fatalities a number of measures have been adopted - seatbelts being an obvious example. The extent to which these measures help or hinder is often the subject of discussion - sometimes people have a reduced perception of danger and adapt their behavior accordingly. For example, if people are prone to skid off the road on icy bends a manufacturer might put traction control in their vehicles to reduce the incidence of such accidents. Which is all well and good, until people take up the slack and end up having the same accident but at higher speeds.
Transferring some of these ideas to the issue of firearms sees things like background checks prior to buying a gun, like bans on felons owning guns, and so on. That sort of thing is already in place. Machine guns are almost entirely banned (you can get them but they are hugely expensive and require a more detailed background check and licensing), although the way the left-wing press talks you'd be forgiven for thinking you could just saunter into Wal-Mart and leave within 10 minutes armed with a fully automatic rifle and no questions asked.
It would not be as easy or likely to mass murder children in a school with these methods. Right now the tool being used is guns so that's the current problem that needs solutions. If children are hitting each other with sticks would a parent say, "well I guess there's nothing I can do, because they hypothetically could be throwing rocks or stabbing each other with screwdrivers, so I'll just sit here and think about the root cause of them hitting each other with sticks. "
The question still needs to come back to how to mitigate harm without imposing upon the rights of millions of law-abiding citizens. When someone drives when drunk and kills an innocent road user we don't call to ban alcohol and we don't call to ban motor vehicles, we deal with the errant individual. We accept that millions of law-abiding citizens operate their vehicles every day in a manner that doesn't recklessly endanger others, so we don't seek to restrict them. But when a gun is concerned, suddenly the gun is the problem.
The background check system is completely lacking and does not accomplish any of the items on my list. As soon as someone commits a violent crime, any firearms registered to them need to be collected by law enforcement. Not just past crimes at the time of purchase.
This is the sort of thing that's all well and good in theory but likely to fail in practise. How would you stop someone from registering guns in the name of someone else? Another problem with the issue of felons and gun ownership is that under the 5th Amendment a felon cannot be required to disclose their ownership of firearms, as they have the right to refuse to incriminate themselves. It would make more sense that if someone commits a violent crime they go to prison, in which case their access to firearms or otherwise ceases to be relevant for several years.
Again that's not an argument. Just because other things can be used to kill people doesn't mean mass killing incidents and fatalities can't be drastically reduced. Essentially you're claiming that unless all causes of murder can be completely avoided, then nothing should ever be done.
It is an argument, and a valid one. After the attack on the Boston Marathon nobody was calling for a ban on pressure cookers - it was rightly recognised that the problem wasn't the pressure cooker but the evil person who turned it into a bomb. In London in the late 1990s there was a spate of nail bomb attacks, mostly aimed at gay bars in the West End. Nobody called for a ban on dirt, or a ban on nails, or a ban on backpacks, it was understood that the problem was an evil person using inanimate objects to cause harm. When the perpetrator of the Nice attack drove a truck into a crowd nobody claimed that anyone with a driving license was tacitly supporting murder, nobody said trucks should be banned, the focus was on the individual who drove the truck. Yet when a gun is used suddenly the problem is the gun, not the person doing evil things with the gun.
Many of the anti-gun arguments are little more than appeals to emotion. Things like "your guns are killing our children", which are so demonstrably untrue it's not funny. I have a friend who has a gun safe with probably a dozen rifles and a dozen handguns in it. His guns aren't killing children - somehow he manages to get through each day without executing anybody. A gun is an inanimate object, the problem is the people doing evil things with them. And an associated problem is those, typically on the left of the political spectrum, who turn every issue that relates to guns into an excuse to try and ban guns, while ignoring the millions of people who own firearms without doing anything stupid with them.
If banning guns is the answer to school shootings then logically banning motor vehicles is even more important as the answer to fatalities on the road. One difference there is that the exhaust fumes from cars, especially in city areas, is also dangerous whereas guns don't produce toxic emissions the way cars do.
Maybe that's the answer. We can all go back to living like the Amish. I'm sure the "if it saves one life it's worth it" brigade would love to give up their cars, you know, to save lives.
As you can probably figure, I'm not claiming that we should do nothing unless we can prevent all murders. I'm saying that any attempt to reduce evil activity needs to be balanced against the rights of the law-abiding. If we were all locked up in solitary confinement all day every day there would be no more murders at all, and no more rape, and no more mugging, and no more theft, and no more drunk driving, and so on. But I don't see people calling for that sort of solution, because it's a ridiculous imposition upon those who have done nothing wrong. Likewise, taking guns away from millions of law-abiding citizens is a totally disproportionate and inappropriate response to the problem of school shootings.
