As if White Settlement didn’t do enough to undermine gun control’s arguments all on its own, there’s another bit of information that shows us just how useless gun control really is.

You see, the big argument is that gun control is needed to prevent mass shootings. While White Settlement showed us the wisdom of law-abiding armed citizens in a place, anti-gunners are still pushing forward with their claim that we need gun control to prevent things like that from happening at all.

Of course, if that were true, California would have fewer mass shootings than anywhere else. However, they actually led the nation in 2019.

A database compiled by the Associated Press (AP), USA Today, and Northeastern University recorded that the United States suffered more mass killings in 2019 than any year on record, with 41 recorded incidents and 211 deaths.

The AP report stated: “California, with some of the most strict gun laws in the country, had the most, with eight such mass slayings.”

A December 28 report from Breitbart noted that California has universal background checks, gun registration requirements, gun confiscation laws, a 10-day waiting period on gun purchases, an “assault weapons” ban, a one-handgun-a-month purchase limit, a ban on campus carry for self-defense, and a ban on teachers being armed to return fire if under attack. California also requires would-be gun buyers to acquire a safety certificate from the state before being permitted to purchase a gun.

Additionally, California has placed controls on ammunition purchases.

Despite the lack of any statistical evidence between strict gun controls and gun-related deaths (other than reasonable conclusions that strict gun controls lead to even more violence, e.g., Chicago and New York City), gun-control advocates renew their efforts to impose stricter controls on gun purchase after every mass shooting.

Gun-control advocates renew those efforts because they don’t really know what else to do. California’s mass killing problem–not all were shootings, to be fair, and many are probably more gang-related than anything else–should serve as ample evidence that the problem isn’t guns.

Anti-gun voices will automatically jump to the claim that California’s problems stem from pro-gun states where firearms are obtained and smuggled into California. Of course, this line of reasoning never explains why those states don’t reach that level of violence themselves. Funny how that shakes out, isn’t it?

Now, in the interest of fairness, it should be noted that California has the largest population in the United States, so that’s going to factor into raw number reports like this.

However, other reports paint a similar picture. For example, this running total finds California has almost twice as many mass shootings as Texas while the Lone Star State has about two-thirds the population.

This should make one thing perfectly clear; when you’re dealing with mass shootings, gun control laws aren’t the answer to anything. Armed citizens being empowered to act in such situations does more to reduce the death toll than anything else.

It’s important to remember that a few years from now, White Settlement won’t be remembered while Sutherland Springs will be. Why? Because White Settlement didn’t have the same body count. In fact, it’ll be another example of an event that gets ignored when people claim armed citizens don’t stop mass shootings simply because he never met the definition of a mass shooting.

What it also is, though, is something that doesn’t happen in California. That’s not going to help drop the number of mass killings in 2020.