Tuesday Talk*: Can Mass Shootings Be Prevented In A RKBA Nation?

Much as some wish passionately that Heller never happened, that the Second Amendment would disappear, that Bruen didn’t make it worse and even less coherent, the reality as we find it today is that Americans have a fundamental individual right to bear arms and the limits on that right are, well, far more limited than Nino Scalia thought when he wrote his errant paragraph in Heller.

These are not the subjects of argument here, because this reflects the current state of the law and, if one enjoys their constitutional rights, one can’t deny the constitutional rights of others that one doesn’t like as much.

But, it’s undeniable that there are a lot of mass shootings. These aren’t of the sort that ramp up numbers merely by body count, but the sort of shooting that pretty much any sentient person would agree is a mass shooting, some person who goes into a place with other people around and starts shooting. If may be a mall, a store or a school, but it ends with bodies of innocent people who shouldn’t be dead at the end of the day.

Much as you may like guns (or adore them as David French argues), and believe deeply in their need for self-protection, whether from an intruder or the government, these mass shootings are still terrible tragedies that should be prevented. There can be no modestly sane human being who isn’t outraged and heartbroken by these murders. There can be no modestly sane human being who doesn’t want to prevent them from happening, to save the innocent from being needless murdered by zealots and crazies.

So what can be done? Is there any tradeoff that could save lives given our jurisprudence and the fear and loathing of Americans who see any effort to reduce mass shootings as an effort to seize their ARs? Even if the reaction is that it’s not guns, but crazies with guns, that are the problem, it still raises the question of how to keep guns out of the hands of crazies.

Are red flag laws, often of dubious constitutionality, the solution to mass shootings? Thus far, they don’t seem to have had much impact. Are there other laws that would find wide acceptance that could help? Are there any laws that would find wide acceptance, despite the  regularity of shooting deaths?

Are we a nation doomed to watching elementary children die because any effort to prevent their death could erode the right to keep and bear arms? Is there nothing we can do, as mass shootings are too real to ignore?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply, within reason.