Right now, we hear all about mass shootings from anti-gunners. They’re treated like a massive epidemic in this country, something we simply have to do something about before everyone in the entire country dies from a mass shooting. How that would work, I have no idea, but “gun control” and “logic” rarely go together.

However, at least one anti-gun op-ed seems to at least understand that if you’re looking at gun-related violence, mass shootings don’t really account for much of anything.

News of the shooting in Kansas City, Miss. on Oct. 6, 2019 stormed social media for a couple days, but after a week, the usual discourse about gun rights and mass shootings died down. Four people died and five were wounded, yet most of the nation moved on after the initial shock factor faded away.

However, the Kansas City shooting paints a different picture than most of the recent mass shootings in America. This shooting did not take place in a school, nor was it racially charged. The story is about two men who got into a fight at a bar and started shooting.

The entire dialogue surrounding American mass shootings is wrong. According to the World Population Review, the U.S. is actually ranked 66 in the world for mass shootings per capita. The media often portrays that the U.S. has a mass shooting problem, but mass shootings only make up a sliver of the larger gun violence issue in this country.

According to Nurith Aizenman and Marc Silver of National Public Radio (NPR), the U.S. has the 28th-highest rate of deaths related to gun violence in the world, worse than Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen. Considering suicide and general homicides, the U.S. has a serious gun violence issue, not so much a mass shootings issue.

I have to applaud the writer for not falling victim to the blunder so many of her ideological brethren do. After all, she’s looking at real facts and not the made-up ones that exist only in the typical anti-gun head. We actually are ranked fairly low with regard to mass shootings on the worldwide stage, though you wouldn’t know that from the media report.

However, she loses it in the very next paragraph.

Although mass shootings are tragic, the broader focus of anti-gun activism has to be suicide and homicide prevention. Assault weapons should be banned, but that legislation would have no effect on other gun-related deaths.

If the impact of banning so-called assault weapons would be so minimal, then just why in the hell should we ban them?

Of course, the writer goes on to hit all the other anti-gun talking points, which isn’t surprising, but at least she expressed something that was actually true prior to shifting her focus away from mass shootings.

She’s absolutely right that we should be directing our attention to combating more mundane forms of violence; if there is such a beast. The problem is that she’s still looking at gun control to provide the answers to these forms of violence, yet if she did the research, she should also be able to see that violent crime with other weapons is also a serious problem. If she dug a bit further she might have found that most criminals are already getting their guns through illegal means, thus negating claims that background checks somehow reduce violence.

Instead, it would be far more useful to go after violent crime by going after the source, by eliminating the roots of violence itself. There are a number of plans that really do try to do just that, and those are things we should be devoting much of our time toward trying to implement throughout our nation. They’ll work without infringing on the rights of ordinary Americans.

That’s what we should be working toward. It’s only too bad that she stopped her research a bit too short.