[neartheplain]

Dismissing what people living in Oakland, southeast D.C., and the north side of Milwaukee know from frequent painful experience to be true as "white nationalist talking points" says more about your views than it does mine. Try following crime reporters on Twitter for a few weeks, like D.C. Realtime News. It's a constant march of death in these troubled communities, almost entirely bubbled up and separate from the rest of America. You won't get it until you really dive into it. Then you'll wonder why the people who purport to care for black lives never say a word about it. The victims of this violence wonder that too, out loud and on social media, but not in places most HN users or policymakers try to see.

Backing up, there are two issues here which you're conflating, and which I didn't do a good job of separating: total gun homicides and mass shootings. They intersect but also have differences. I already went deep on total gun homicides. The weird thing about mass shootings is that 70 years ago, gun ownership was more widespread than it is now, yet mass shootings were an extremely rare occurence... until Columbine. Semiautomatic and even fully-automatic weapons were commonly available beginning in the 1920s (remember Al Capone's mob and their Thompson submachine guns? Bonny and Clyde with their BARs?), yet we didn't see this rash of mass shootings until just the last few decades. What happened in the 90s, and how to we fix it?

Side note, and I'm sure it's been covered elsewhere, but 99% of gun deaths in the US do not involve AR-15s or "assault weapons." 97% of all gun deaths are from handguns. Many mass shootings were carried out with handguns; they are deadly, concealable, and potentially also very high-capacity. Personally I support much stricter controls on handgun sales and ownership. I think that would be a reasonable starting point to approach both total gun homicides and mass shootings.