> empirical evidence instead of lofty ideals
The problem with a lot of anti-gun measures is that the proponents readily admit that they would not have stopped any particular shooter. For instance, people talk about background checks, but this shooter and many others did not have a history and were not known to police. They would have passes a background check.
Often times the person acquiring the gun already broke a number of gun laws. Either straw purchase, borrowed someones gun, carrying across state lines, etc. So throwing more laws at it won't necessarily help. Enforcement of existing laws could help but is obviously difficult. Not to mention that gun violence is much higher in cities/counties/states with the most gun control measures. You can say that they just get the guns from elsewhere and national restrictions need to be imposed, but we should see SOME effect. Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan.
So the conversation from anti-gun people basically amounts to less guns everywhere, but that genie might be out of the bottle already. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US and it would be impractical to seize even a tiny percent of them.
But note that there were always guns in America. In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.
https://nypost.com/2018/03/31/when-toting-guns-in-high-schoo...