In more than three-quarters of the mass shootings that occurred from 1966 to 2019, the perpetrators legally purchased at least one of their weapons, according to data from the National Institute of Justice. After the Nashville attack this week, Tennessee’s Republican Rep. Tim Burchett said, according to Axios, that the laws are fine and that Congress doesn’t need to act: “We’re not going to fix it, criminals are going to be criminals.”
Rob Pincus, executive vice president of the pro-gun Second Amendment Organization, is among those who feel the debate over banning specific firearms and devices like the stabilizing brace should be refocused on stopping shooters before they act.
“The underlying problem is people are trying to kill people,” Pincus said. “We may never be able to even pretend that we will stop all spree killings involving firearms or otherwise. The important thing is that we do what we can to reduce the number, and that means proactive intervention. At the end of the day, it’s family members, friends, community members and individual gun owners who are watching the behavior of the other people in their world.”
But on the other side of the equation, gun control advocates look at the Nashville attack and see weapons that were used in exactly the way that lawmakers feared when they enacted bans and restrictions like the tightening of rules on stabilizing braces.
David Pucino, deputy chief counsel at Giffords Law Center, told VICE News an assault weapons ban like the one that Biden called for this week could have prevented the shooter from obtaining two of the three weapons used in the attack, with the exception of the 9mm pistol.
“We’re talking about weapons of different destructive capacities, but at the end of the day, a gun is a gun,” Pucino said. “And as we’ve seen too many times over the years, any gun can kill a child.”
— Keegan Hamilton in The Nashville Shooter’s Arsenal Makes a Mockery of Us Gun Laws
