Ft. Hood Massacre

Many years ago, someone (perhaps even Neal Knox) made the observation that the only time that the gun control movement scores a victory, it is by "dancing in blood"--meaning that there has been some horrendous mass murder with a gun. The Brady Campaign's successes in the 1980s and 1990s, at both the state and federal levels, were largely driven by legislators responding emotionally to such disasters. In some cases, those disasters revealed real deficiencies in our laws--but the Brady Campaign's "solutions" were seldom the right fixes to these problems. One of the positive changes in how legislators now respond to these disasters has been driven by the enormous amount of research done by criminologists concerning gun crime. For example, after the Virginia Tech massacre, the primary change was not more gun control laws--but improvements in mental illness records. The reason was simple: this massacre, like many others in the last few decades, was a failure of the public mental health system not a failure of gun control laws. Legislators in both Virginia and Congress were able to recognize the source Of the problem, and make a precisely targeted correction to the mental illness record laws--not more restrictions On the vast majority of gun owners who are not a problem.