With Santa Clarita not even a distant memory, anti-gun voices are already using it to demand more gun control. Even before the facts were known, Sen. Dick Blumenthal demanded the Senate capitulate to his whims and pass a universal background check bill that wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the shooting as far as anyone can tell.

This is normal for anti-gunners. They routinely prattle about how we need more gun control after a mass shooting.

However, Santa Clarita is in California, the most gun controlled state in the nation. There’s virtually no measure being seriously discussed by lawmakers at the federal level that hasn’t been on the books in California for years.

If gun control worked, Santa Clarita wouldn’t have happened.

I’m not the only one who thinks this, obviously. For example, John Lott argues that California’s gun control laws might actually be the problem.

Another school shooting, this time by a 15-year-old at Saugus High School in California, another quest for answers. Yet, 20 years after Columbine, the United States is still looking for how to stop mass public shootings. The rest of the world, where mass public shootings are actually much more common, is also looking for solutions. Russia, France, Finland, and Norway are among the European countries that have experienced far more deaths per capita from these attacks.

Change is coming, if slowly, in the United States. Earlier this year Florida and Texas passed major improvements to their laws that are significantly increasing the number of teachers with guns at school. Both bills received strong support from those states’ Republican governors.

Florida’s bill removed a limitation that only allowed non-classroom-based teachers to defend the classroom. Texas removed the cap on the number of school personnel that can carry firearms at schools.

It isn’t by coincidence that every mass public shooting in Europe since at least 1990 has occurred in an area where general, law-abiding citizens are banned from carrying firearms for protection, and for recent mass public shootings in New Zealand, Brazil, and the Netherlands. That has also held true for 94% of such attacks in the U.S. since 1950.

…

It is past time for us to do something that really works. With another mass public shooting in California, it is time for California to recognize that its gun control laws might actually be part of the problem. Let’s stop leaving our schoolchildren as sitting ducks.

It’s a fair point. California law makes it impossible for any teacher to legally carry a firearm in the classroom.

Meanwhile, the same people who argue that preemption is wrong because it doesn’t let communities decide for themselves how to address gun violence also won’t allow communities to decide for themselves how best to address gun violence. That’s because anyone who doesn’t support gun control is wrong in their minds and shouldn’t be allowed a voice.

At the end of the day, the gun control laws–even federal gun control laws–failed to stop a 16-year-old kid from shooting up his school. As Charles C. W. Cooke at the National Review noted, 16-year-olds aren’t allowed to buy guns in California. Of course, they’re not allowed to buy guns anywhere. That’s federal law, not just a state measure.

Yet here we have a child get a gun and kill people.

We also have another high-profile shooting in a state with the strictest gun control measures on in the country. If gun control worked so well, Santa Clarita simply wouldn’t have happened.

But it did.

Maybe it’s time we stop looking at guns as the issue and remember that there’s a lot more going on with these killings than weapon selection. If you want to address the problem, start looking at why these kids want to murder their classmates and not worry about what they want to murder them with.