If the root problem is mental illness of some sort (and indeed it is) will curtailing guns solve or cure the underlying mental illness problem? If so how?
Again, who runs the thought police? Who decides what is “wrong thought”?
The Oxford HS shooter was obviously disturbed. Teachers that morning saw what the kid was scribbling in his notebook, and reported it. The kid’s parents were called into the school that day, shown what the kid was scribbling, and urged to take him home that moment. The parents refused to take him home, so he was sent back to class. A few hours later, he started shooting, killing four.
That was an easy case.
The shooters in Buffalo, El Paso, and Charleston, all had a clearly stated white supremacist agenda. Are you going to make white supremacist ideology illegal?
The guy who shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado had an anti-abortion agenda. Are you going to make being pro-life illegal? In that case, the perp was written off as a head case to avoid addressing the question of pro-life people being mass murderers.
The guys who blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City had an anti-government agenda. Are you going to make being anti-government illegal?
There are large numbers of people, and powerful forces, promoting white supremacy, pro-life, and anti-government agendas in this country that make it impossible for the thought police to deem those ideologies “wrong thought”. I submit that it is impossible to tell when an otherwise rational person will tip from spouting a popular ideology, to shooting, because, to him, shooting the people that offend his ideology is a logical course of action.
Steve