The problem of gun violence, especially mass shootings, is not all that complicated.  The solution for it has been figured out by every other industrialized nation on the planet.  The US has CHOSEN to not solve it.  Those reasons are also simple – power.  As long as the gun culture has an outsized voice with the electorate, namely the Senate, nothing will happen.  That doesn’t mean the answer is complicated, but money and power wont allow it.  To avoid talking about the real solution to gun violence, politicians and the gun lobby repeat bullshit every time there is a mass shooting, which is now a weekly occurrence.

Let’s review said bullshit:

1. Good guy with a gun – the most common, yet one of the most false.  Almost no mass shootings are stopped by an armed citizen, and in fact, armed citizens are generally killed or wounded trying to help, like the security guard at the Tops Grocery in Buffalo New York a few weeks ago.
2. An armed society is a polite society” – this one is as stupid as it sounds.  Name me an Open Carry Texas member who is a polite member of society and I’ll show you a fictional character.
3. More guns equals more safety – if that were true, we’d be the safest society on the planet.  As it is, our gun violence death rate is 4 times that of industrialized nations.
4. Crime decreased as we loosened gun laws – which equals, “I ate ice cream yesterday, then it rained.  Eating ice cream causes rain.”  Correlation does not equal causality, but I can say now that the states with looser gun laws have greater per capita gun deaths than those with strict gun laws.
5. What about “shall not be infringed” do you not understand – which is one of the silliest arguments.  All historic documents, including James Madison’s own notes, showed that the Founders were terrified of standing armies, (especially the British) and decided to defend the new US government with citizen militias under local authorities federalized during times of war.  That history is well documented and easily studied for those who read past the NRA’s propaganda.  In the early days, firearms were kept at home, but ammunition and gun powder were kept in local armories for safety.  Our founding generation was not populated by idiots.
6. Criminals don’t follow the law – again, an idiotic argument which supports the notion that, if this is true, we shouldn’t have stop signs, traffic lights, or speed limits.  Laws aren’t written for people to obey, since responsible citizens do that.  Laws are written to establish a framework of enforcement and punishment for those who don’t follow the law.
7. We should harden our schools and have armed law enforcement guarding the schools – again a stupid argument.  First, making every school in the nation a fortress is impossible.  Second it doesn’t work.  Case in point, just YESTERDAY, there were armed police at the school in Uvalde when the shooter got there.  They shot at him, but he was wearing body armor and was returning fire with an AR-15.  Even though there were armed officers at the school, he got in anyway, then killed 19 children and two teachers.  The cops got him only after SWAT arrived and blew him away with comparable weapons to what he was using.
8. We should arm the teachers – Ted Cruz made this idiotic statement many times including yesterday. This is the dumbest goddam suggestion of all.  See number 7 above.  If police couldn’t stop him, how the fuck is little Ms. Perrywinkle, the second grade arithmetic teacher two years out of college going to do it?

Ted Cruz, pull your head out of your ass.