Until We Stop Focusing on the Tool Instead of the Individual, Mass Shootings Will Continue

Last night, Mark Levin talked about the latest shootings in California and how we are never going to solve these things as long as one side's default position is to ban a certain type of gun:

The fallback position for the Democrats, for the media, Pelosi today is we need an assault weapons ban. We had a so-called assault weapons ban in 1994. We’ve had John Lott on this program before with his genius and his ability to comprehend and explain statistics like nobody else. And it made no difference. But why did it make no difference? Because if you’re a career killer or you’re a member of a gang, or you’re plotting to kill people. You’re not going to acquire a gun necessarily, legally maybe, or steal it from somebody, a family member. Maybe you’ll get it on the black market. There’s just enormous numbers of ways they assume, to do this sort of. And so their default position is assault weapons ban. So we’re never going to resolve this as long as there’s an ideological default position. I don’t know that we can ever solve it, period. Given there are nutjobs out there, there’s evil people out there and so forth and so on. 

You can listen to the entire clip here.

Jim Geraghty wrote over at National Review that you can't ban something that is already banned.  You see, the firearm that was used was already on the list of banned firearms in California:

The shooter in Monterey Park reportedly used a Cobray M11 9mm semi-automatic weapon, which is designed to look like, and is often mistaken for, the MAC-10. Cobray purchased the rights to the design from the Military Armament Corporation and created its own smaller, lighter, cheaper version. Those who take shooting seriously consider the Cobray M11 “one of the most useless handguns in existence” and conclude that, “Everything about this gun just makes it hard to shoot accurately, so it’s much better to fire from the hip and keep your enemies guessing.”

Both the MAC-10 and the Cobray M11 are illegal to possess in California.  

 He continued:

Gun-control advocates have a problem here, in that they are calling for the ban of a weapon that is already illegal. The state can increase the criminal penalties for possessing one, but it cannot ban it harder. ...This is the distilled essence of the modern gun-control movement: throwing additional civil penalties atop the considerable criminal penalties imposed on illegal-gun dealers, in the hopes of keeping guns out of the hands of those who, because they are not in their rights minds and don’t necessarily plan on living long enough to face justice for the crimes they intend to commit, will go to nearly any length to procure weapons.

As Levin noted, Democrats are focused like a laser on banning guns with Gavin Newsom calling the Second Amendment a "suicide pact" and Joe Biden using the shootings to push for banning so-called "assault weapons".

Both Levin and Geraghty make a good point.  The individuals who commit these heinous crimes don't care about the law.  They are intent on doing evil.  And no amount of gun control is going to change that fact.