New York City Police Department via AP

Mass shootings are an American issue.

How many times have we heard that? How many times have gun control activists tried using that as a bludgeon to try and bully people into accepting some form of gun control?

We’re told over and over that other countries don’t have this problem. Mass shootings don’t happen outside of our borders.

Well, I’m sure Brazil will be glad to know what happened there on Wednesday wasn’t a real mass shooting, then.

Two hooded young men entered a school in Brazil with guns blazing Wednesday, killing at least six students and two school employees, according to reports.

The shooters wore masks when they entered the school, police said. The gunmen began firing away before ultimately killing themselves. Witnesses told Brazilian media they saw someone shooting a gun outside the school before going inside.

Other children at the Raul Brasil school, in Suzano, a suburb of Sao Paulo, were shot and were rushed to hospitals with injuries, Reuters reported. At least 10 people were injured, two of them in serious condition, according to reports.

…

Colonel Marcelo Salles, commander of the military police, said the shooters fired at the owner of a jet near the school before they unleashed the attack on the students. The jet owner was being treated at a hospital, the commander said.

Salles said the shooters used a .38 caliber revolver, a bow and arrows and explosives.

Unpossible!

I have it on good authority that this kind of thing doesn’t happen without AR-15s.

Look, the loss of life is tragic. It always is. Worse than that, it’s senseless. There’s no reason for these kinds of atrocities. There never is.

But eight people are dead, and the killers used a revolver and archery equipment.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Brazil has strict gun control laws. While President Jair Bolsonaro is in favor of liberalizing gun ownership and has made some steps toward doing so, it’s still pretty tightly controlled. Especially by American standards. They have pretty much every law American gun grabbers want as the standard operating procedure.

Yet it didn’t stop a mass shooting from happening. The problem isn’t guns. It has never been.

It’s people. The problem has always been people. Like the guy in the movie said, some men just want to watch the world burn. They want chaos. They want to slaughter people, to lash out in their rage at anything. They’re violent, dangerous people with no respect for human life. Laws don’t stop them.

If they did, the laws against murder would be sufficient.

This isn’t a uniquely American problem. It’s a universal problem, a human problem. It’s a problem that can’t be solved by passing gun control laws that continually fail but allow politicians to pat themselves on the back and pretend they’re “serious” about the issue. They’re not. They don’t care all that much about the problem.

If they did, they’d stop pretending that it doesn’t happen in other countries because clearly, it does.