A person capable of shooting a five year old eleven times is beyond gun control.

[Azathoth]

151. Several possible answers to that

1) The only overseas mass killings that get reported here in the States are the large-scale, truly unspeakable "media events" like the Breivik rampage. I would be interested in seeing the numbers of smaller scale murder sprees (i.e. three or more people killed, not necessarily with a gun, reported in local papers, no international coverage) from those countries.

2) I'm willing to concede that draconian gun bans -- ie complete bans on handguns, shotguns, etc. -- make it more difficult for maniacs to go on opportunistic killing sprees and may therefore reduce the "snap" incidents where someone goes nuts over a short period of time and ends up slaughtering people. But I am not convinced those kinds of laws would have stopped a guy like Holmes, who was smart enough to get into a neuroscience PhD program and who spent several months planning and preparing for his rampage. Individuals like that are in the same category as terrorists: they will find a way to hurt large numbers of people, one way or the other. Besides, from a practical standpoint, blanket bans on handguns and similar provisions are now unambiguously unconstitutional, so they aren't available options in the United States.

3) Looking at the numbers of mass killings in the United States, it seems the past couples years may be an aberration themselves. We've been a heavily armed country since 1776. One chart posted recently showed that in the late 70's, between 50% to 60% of people -- Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike -- owned a firearm. There has been no great advance in the lethality of gun technology since that time, yet the incidence rate (or at least the body-count) of these mass killing sprees seems to be spiking, and that spike began while the AWB was in effect. That suggests to me there are underlying sociological factors at work here which will not be solved through gun control.

The bottom line, from my perspective, is that gun control is designed to get guns off the streets and reduce violent crime. Even purging every gun from a country will not stop massacres there, nor will it address whatever underlying sociological issues are driving those massacres.