It didn’t get the headlines some other shootings got, like the one in Coney Island over the weekend, but for the folks in Bend, Oregon, it got plenty. Two people dead, plus the shooter. It’s enough to upset any community.

Now, though, it seems it’s restarted the gun control debate there.

The deadly shooting in Bend on Sunday shook Oregon communities and shone a light back on the call for stricter gun control measures.

In a briefing Monday, Bend police said the shooter shot and killed two people at a Safeway, using an AR-15-style rifle. Then he shot and killed himself.

The shooting is bringing renewed attention Oregon’s Ballot Measure 114, the “Changes to firearm ownership and purchase requirements initiative.”

It will be up for a vote this November.

Except, does anyone think the killer wouldn’t have been able to claim just as many lives with a handgun? Or the shotgun he left in his vehicle?

Hell, what about the three Molotov cocktails the killer left in there as well? How many lives could he have claimed with those alone?

While many want to blame the AR-15’s availability for such acts, there’s literally nothing here that couldn’t have been accomplished with pretty much any other firearm on the planet.

It’s. Not. The. Guns.

The killer in this instance was, as so many are, mentally deranged and eager to slaughter innocent people. He went into a grocery store, likely because of the media coverage of Buffalo and El Paso, and was thankfully unable to kill enough people to garner those same headlines.

Thankfully.

So why bring up the upcoming vote? The answer is easy. The news station here wants to link an incident like this in the mind of voters. It wants them to see the proposed measure as a way to prevent just this. Yeah, proponents are saying it, but there’s no reason to air those claims unless you want to link them in the mind as if they’re an established fact.

Further, while they did get countering opinions on the bill, they apparently didn’t ask anyone against the bill whether or not it might have made a difference here. If they did, they didn’t air it, which is interesting.

Of course, if you’re a biased reporter trying to score political points, you wouldn’t. You’d get a couple of quotes from whoever so you look neutral, but you won’t really put in any effort to get all sides of the story so people can make up their own minds.

If they did that, they might recognize that this proposal wouldn’t make Oregon safer. It wouldn’t stop shootings like what happened in Bend.

All you’ll get are good people seeing their rights infringed while the evil that walks among them circumvents any and all laws they can find in order to slaughter good, decent people.

No law is going to change that, either.

The Safeway shooting in Bend is awful, but in a very real way, it illustrates just why the measure won’t do what proponents claim.