With the events of Monday still fresh in our minds, it’s not a surprise that gun control is yet again a topic of discussion. We can’t wait until we know exactly what happened or anything, we have to immediately start talking about gun control.

This isn’t surprising, though. We know it’s going to happen. We’ve come to accept it like the media claims we’ve come to accept mass shootings–though no one has ever seemed to really accept those.

What gets hilarious, though, are the op-eds claiming that Republicans should totally flip on gun control, a key issue for them, and side with Democrats.

The only path out of America’s cycle of gun violence is for the Republican Party to change course and join Democrats in backing far-reaching gun control. Otherwise, Americans will continue to be victims of gun violence, see friends or relatives shot, or be haunted by those possibilities.

I joined the third group this week.

On Monday, a man fired shots at a downtown building in Louisville, killing at least four people and injuring numerous others. I had been at the building, which housed a bank branch as well as office space, for a news conference in December, as Mayor-elect Craig Greenberg announced top aides in his administration.

The ongoing national wave of these shootings has made me increasingly leery of attending large events or visiting schools or other venues where mass carnage is all-to-easy to imagine. Five years ago, a high school friend of mine was shot (but thankfully survived) in a mass shooting in nearby Cincinnati. Monday’s shooting makes me even more nervous — I had been in this physical space before.

I get being haunted.

I never see a mass shooting report without remembering learning a dear friend of mine was among the dead in the Cafe Racer shooting in Seattle.

Yet the author’s personal ghosts aren’t grounds for Republicans to suddenly change their minds on gun control.

That’s because anti-gun advocates haven’t been able to make their case that gun control would actually stop these shootings in the first place.

For one thing, we have the heavily biased and therefore useless studies that never get critical examination. We also have more easily understood facts like two mass shootings in less than two days in California earlier this year, to say nothing of seeing them in plenty of other countries.

Everywhere we look, the laws we’re told are needed to stop these shootings from happening just don’t stop them.

Gun control isn’t the answer. That’s been clear time and time again, though people like the author somehow managed to miss the memo in their push to pretend they’re somehow righteous in their narrative.

Republicans don’t need to side with Democrats on gun control because while we may not know the answer, we know what it’s not.

Gun control has an abysmal record of stopping atrocities, though its existence has precipitated more than a few. After all, how many mass shootings happen in gun-free zones?

The author presents gun control as if it were the obvious and only way to prevent these things from happening. He can’t seem to grasp that as a mass shooting preventative, it fails every test.