How Shootings Stigmatize People Living with Mental Illness

[jgalt]

<snip>...The bulk of the issue are crimes committed with firearms by people who got their guns without a background check.

...and who would never go through one anyway...

[DoxaPar]

<snip>...The bulk of the issue are crimes committed with firearms by people who got their guns without a background check.

...and who would never go through one anyway...

Exactly.

[GunClasses.Net]

The bulk of the issue are crimes committed with firearms by people who got their guns without a background check.

(I believe the Navy Yard shooter's use of an AR-15 was revealed to be a false claim; I know you weren't saying that, but I'm reminding everyone of that just to be clear...)

While that may be true, the anti-gun folks are not going after what's the bulk of the issue, but the face of it. Their tactics shrewdly can leverage the media hype of any particular incident. It doesn't matter if the 'solution' will solve much of the actual problem, if it professes to address the fear that not moving forward with the 'solution' will result in at least one more tragic event. The odds of any particular citizen today being affected personally by a mass shooting, much less being in one, are so minuscule that death by mass shooting is very far down the list of likely threats. Yet, all the anti- gun folks need to do is keep that story replaying so that the public meditates on it as if it were in fact a prominent problem, and with that, keep getting airtime to campaign for their 'solution'. The persistence is not in the problem but in the way it's kept in the fore. The irony is that the media attention on mass shootings may itself perpetuate more of them.

Possibly because of this, not all gun owners, such as the one posting here yesterday yearning for robust databases and background checks, will debate the efficacy of background checks with the anti-gun folks.