Many are still repulsed by the monstrous actions of Salvador Ramos who brutally gunned down nineteen students and two teachers in the nation's second-deadliest mass shooting. This act of barbarity has rightly aroused intense emotions, but emotional responses to mass shootings won't make them less frequent. In the aftermath of a mass shooting, the knee-jerk response is to lobby for more aggressive gun control, and let's be realistic: even conservative supporters of the Second Amendment are sympathetic to these recommendations because no sane person wants a deranged individual to murder innocent children.

Nevertheless, emotional outbursts must be tempered by logic. Critics surmise that stringent measures will curb gun crimes; however, the evidence that stricter gun laws reduce gun crimes is far from conclusive. In the United States, New York and Chicago have high homicide rates despite punitive gun laws, whereas places like Maine and Vermont, with high rates of gun ownership and lax gun laws, respectively, have relatively low rates of gun violence.