[_delirium]

The "assault weapons" (yeah, that term is not well defined) that get used in high profile mass shootings are, on the whole, less often used in crime or to kill people than handguns. Even if a ban was effective, it would be unlikely to produce any noticeable effect.

A corollary to this is a guess that the handful of high-profile mass shootings just aren't good proxies for violence in general. I think many people view it as the "straw the broke the camel's back", an extreme example of a general class of problems that finally got people to take the problem seriously, like the Cuyahoga River catching on fire did for water pollution. But an alternate hypothesis is that these rare events are very different (in causes and solutions) from the more common kinds of violence, so the discussion focused on these handful of anomalous data points is not very useful for figuring out how to reduce violence overall.

[btilly]

Exactly. A better mental illness safety net likely would reduce mass shootings. Tackling drug gang violence is more likely to have an impact on homicide rates.

See http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editoria... for discussion of an approach that saves lives year in and year out, but does not reduce mass shootings.