Why not mandate trigger locks and locked gun cases?

Here's the problem with laws. Laws work if you have some way to enforce them. Take your example for instance. Guns weren't secured properly and the kid killed his mother.

The law in Connecticut requires that you must secure your firearms in a locked container if you have a minor in a household.

The law is there, if it's not adhered to then honestly what exactly are you going to do about that?

 

The sad part is that each of these mass shootings in itself shows irrefutable evidence as to why a myriad of these proposals simply aren't going to work.

Mandatory background checks - wouldn't have stopped Vegas
AR ban - wouldn't have stopped VT or Texas
Magazine ban - wouldn't have stopped VT or Texas
Mandatory firearm securing within the home - didn't stop Texas

I always hear "enough is enough" or "how many more..." in regards to proposals FOR gun regulation. My question is "how many more...." of these shootings do we have to have before people realize that your proposals won't work? It sounds terrible but honestly the evidence is there, each of these shootings provides the evidence of exactly WHY a certain proposal isn't going to work.

 

I appreciate the consistency of your argument but I have to disagree to some extent. Parents can child proof a home to the best of their ability but you really can't make a home foolproof. If you've ever had kids you'll understand that kids can be deceptively clever, like cats almost. I remember years ago waking up and walking downstairs to find my ex's little boy on top of the refrigerator eating the Reese's Puffs that we kept in the cabinet above the fridge for this exact reason. Somehow he got up there but he couldn't figure out how to get back down so he just stayed up there. There was no chair pulled up to it or anything he was just up there somehow, my freaking heart fell into my stomach. He thought it was funny, I almost had a heart attack. I don't even know how he knew the cereal was up there and to this day I still have no idea how in the actual hell he got up there. He was 3.....

Point is a lot of these safety measures help but they aren't a be all end all solution. Sometimes kids harm themselves due to gross negligence of their parents and sometimes kids accidentally harm themselves because they are deceptively more clever than we think. Sometimes parents are stupid but sometimes kids just manage to get themselves into stuff that we didn't even think about.

 

In Vegas a background check was conducted on the individual before purchasing the firearms. The background check revealed no criminal history. His medical records showed no record of any sort of mental disorder. The gun store owners who are licensed and trained to spot "questionable" individuals saw nothing out of the ordinary with this man and found nothing abnormal about him after talking to him prior to selling him firearms. Interviews with his family and friends revealed nothing abnormal about him and he displayed no outward signs of abnormal or even questionable behavior. The man was the textbook definition of the word "normal".

The Parkland shooter was the exact opposite definition of the Vegas shooter. A troubled kid with a KNOWN and recorded history of mental illness and instability who had been expelled from school and was KNOWN by law enforcement agencies from the FBI down to the local level. His peers mentioned to faculty that he was unstable and possibly dangerous. He was recommended to be involuntarily admitted to an institution due to his questionable behavior and mental instability. He purchased his weapon legally from a store which conducted a background check that did not ping him as unfit to own a firearm because background checks do not include medical history. What could have prevented him from buying a gun would be the law enforcement officials who KNEW the guy was a nutcase for years actually making it illegal for him to purchase a firearm. In this case, the law enforcement officials failed. Not the law.

In Texas there is a law that states a firearm must be secured "reasonably" IE locked up in there is a minor (under 17) in the home able to gain possession of the firearm. In the Texas shooting incident the shooter was 17 years old therefore legally allowed to possess the firearm and no law requiring that the firearms be secured in the home. However, the firearms were secured in the home anyway, the shooter allegedly stole the keys to the safe and retrieved the firearms without the consent of the owner (his father). So even if the law were to state that the firearms must be properly secured, they were, and were made unsecured and stolen when the shooter stole the keys to the storage safe and retrieved them. There is no law that can prevent somebody from stealing the keys to your gun safe and opening it.

So once again. What laws can we create that would have prevented the three shootings that you have just mentioned and claimed "wouldn't have happened" if laws were mandated and enforced?

 

You are correct, an AR ban that could magically be enforced and vanish all ARs into thin air would have stopped the Vegas shooter from using an AR-15 to kill those people. Same with Parkland and Sandy Hook. Would they have used different weapons? Nobody knows. However, a background check did not stop these incidents.

An AR-15 ban would have had zero effect on the shootings that occurred in Virginia Tech and Texas because those shooters did not use AR-15s. They used a combination of pistols, revolvers, and a shotgun. The firearms used in Texas WERE secured yet it did not prevent the shooter from gaining access to them.

My point is that certain laws may have stopped some but not others. As you said a combination of laws would have stopped them?

What combination of laws, background checks, AR ban, magazine ban, mandatory securing firearms, would have stopped Texas?

Point is, mass shootings are going to happen whether you ban ARs, ban magazines, force mandatory background checks, etc. The evidence from these mass shootings proves that. Now would they happen with the frequency that they are happening now? I honestly have no idea and neither does anybody else.

The point I'm making and the point I'm hoping you understand is that when you say "An AR ban would have stopped Vegas" is a statement that you cannot make because you have no idea, nobody does. The correct statement is "An AR ban would have stopped the Vegas shooter from killing people with an AR-15". You have no idea if he would have simply used pistols or a shotgun and walked among the crowd instead of sitting in the high rise building. The same with Parkland, Sandy Hook, Aurora, etc.

VT and Texas prove that mass murder can be conducted, unfortunately quite effectively, without the use of AR-15s and high capacity 30 round magazines.

The ONLY thing that we can conclude from an AR-15 ban (that we magically made them all disappear) is that mass murder would no longer be conducted using AR-15s. Not that mass murder would no longer be conducted.

Texas just showed you that, VT showed you that years ago.

Heres the sad reality. You can ban AR's, people are still going to kill each other, people are still going to conduct mass murders, they are just going to do it with pistols and shotguns instead. You can ban 30 round magazines, same thing. You can mandate mandatory background checks, they don't show gun dealers that you are a nutcase, they just show if you've been arrested or have bad credit.

There isn't anything you can actually do to stop this. This isn't a gun problem, this is a culture problem. Something is wrong with the PEOPLE who are doing this and THAT is what your focus should be on. The ONLY way to prevent mass shootings with guns is to ban ALL of the guns somehow. Banning some of them is only going to cause people to use the ones you didn't ban to do their killing with. Texas just showed you how.