The mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio was part of a particularly violent weekend in the United States. On top of the usual mess in places like Chicago, we had the El Paso shooting as well, all right on top of one another. It was not a good time to be defending gun rights. The outrage, still strong following Parkland, ramped into high gear.

In Ohio, a fairly gun-loving state, people were clamoring for gun control.

Now, as the anniversary of that deadly night approaches, people are furious that we didn’t bend over and just let it happen.

The day after a gunman killed nine people and injured 27 more, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine stood on the brick-lined streets of the Oregon District in Dayton and started to speak.

The former prosecutor turned Republican governor remarked about the crowd size and then a voice cried out: “Do something!”

The tightly packed crowd responded, and the chants to “do something!” grew louder and louder until they drowned out DeWine’s words.

The governor promised he would act, and indeed rolled out a comprehensive package within days. But as the one-year anniversary of that awful night approaches, Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature hasn’t voted on a single piece of legislation.

Guns will be just as accessible to people experiencing mental health crises on Aug. 4, 2020, as they were on Aug. 4, 2019. No law has been passed to encourage or require background checks for the private sale of firearms. Punishments for certain violent crimes remain the same.

And, it should be noted, that even if all of those efforts had been put in place before the shooting, nothing would have changed. Nothing at all.

Whoops. I guess the journalists forgot to mention that part.

You see, the Dayton killer had issues, sure, but none of the laws proposed would have had any impact on his ability to purchase a firearm. Besides which, he was apparently using drugs, which makes it illegal to own a firearm anyway–yet another law he broke.

For all the handwringing going around, no one seems to acknowledge that what happened in Dayton wasn’t something that could easily have been prevented. Laws wouldn’t have stopped it, especially those particular bits of law.

Yet for the gun grabbers out there, none of that matters. They’re not upset with the fact that their proposals wouldn’t have stopped the killing. The mass shooting was nothing more than a pretext to them. They wanted to push gun control and the massacre gave them an excuse. Now, they’re upset that the Ohio legislature didn’t take the bait.

Mass shootings are complicated and we don’t understand why they happen. Perhaps its time to unite behind the idea of delving deeply into that so we can do better than using horrible incidents as pretexts for bad law and actually put an end to these things once and for all.

Of course, if we do that, then gun grabbers won’t have their favorite means of justifying gun control. For us, that’s a feature but for them, it’s a huge bug.

I wonder if that’s why they don’t want to look elsewhere.