When the mass shooting at Las Vegas happened, as well as other mass shootings, there are many complaints about the fact that there is not enough debate on the issue of gun control
Despite efforts of Obama, Democratic politicians and a raft of activists, celebrities and talk-show hosts, a dramatic leftward shift on many other social issues, and wall-to-wall media coverage of mass shootings, gun control is substantially less popular than it was in the 1990s
Gun rights is one of the few issues where the Republican Party is actually in touch with what many Americans seem to want
Appeal of gun ownership is links to the "dark side" of individualism or to distrust of your neighbor and your government, to the decay of communities and families, to a sense of being unprotected and on your own
Anti-gun activists seize on the most horrifying acts of killing, understandably, and use them as calls to legislative action
If you go back through the list of recent mass shootings, you don’t see many killers buying guns through the supposed “gun show loophole” or without a background check
Some of the killers passed background checks with flying colors, some passed them because of human and bureaucratic errors, and others simply used someone else to acquire their weaponry, circumventing legal and regulatory obstacles entirely
The diversity of weapons used in the massacres has also made it hard to claim that reviving the assault weapons ban would make deadly sprees much rarer
The killer in Vegas, a man of means and no significant criminal history, almost certainly would have even with tighter gun regulations and stiffer background checks
There was a link between the scale of the Las Vegas killer’s spree and his apparent use of a “bump stock” which lets a semiautomatic weapon fire at the rate of an automatic weapon