The US is reeling from another tragedy this week after a deranged madman walked into a Tennessee Waffle House and began firing rounds from an AR-15 which he was not allowed to have. Gun control measures that were in place—and actually led to the confiscation of Travis Reinking’s guns—did not stop this killer from carrying out the sick thoughts in his head.
Gun control was in place and it failed. What’s more, less than 48 hours after Reinking murdered four people in a Waffle House, another mentally ill man with a seeming thirst for blood went on a killing rampage in Canada, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the world.
In Canada there is no legal right to possess guns. Canadian civilians aren’t allowed to possess automatic weapons, handguns with a barrel shorter than 10.5 cm or any modified handgun, rifle or shotgun. Most semi-automatic assault weapons are also banned. But that didn’t stop Alek Minassian, 25, from killing 10 people and injuring 15 others.
Minassian’s desire to take lives was so strong that he didn’t need a gun to murder. He simply rented a Ryder van and went to it. Consequently, Reinking, who had the notoriously loathed AR-15 rifle didn’t kill half as many people as Minassian who had no gun at all.
He did, however, attempt to pretend to have one as he begged a police officer to kill him.
After multiple pedestrians plowed down on Toronto sidewalk, driver gets out holding what appears to be a gun. Police arrest him. No shots fired. pic.twitter.com/xWHeylS1d8
— Michel Boyer (@BoyerMichel) April 23, 2018
What these two incidents prove is that crazy people who want to kill will do so with or without a gun and with or without permission from the State to have said gun.
According to a 2015 study, even if all guns were removed from America, in a ten year period, 355 people still would’ve been murdered in mass killings.
From 2006 to 2015, 140 people were murdered by arsonists in mass fires, 104 were stabbed in mass stabbings, and 92 people were beaten to death in mass killings. To reiterate, these are deaths in which four or more people were killed.
People sufficiently enraged to commit such crimes may also be motivated to find other ways, criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University points out.
What’s more, every time there is a mass shooting in America, the anti-gun crowd is quick to take to the pulpits and begin spouting off incorrect information on how American gun ownership has made the United States deadlier than European countries. But this is simply not true.
After the tragic shooting in 2015 in which a gunman killed nine people in a Charleston, NC church, then-President Barack Obama took to the media to state that “we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”
Just days later, Sen Harry Reid backed him up, claiming — falsely — that “the United States is the only advanced country where this kind of mass violence occurs.”
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