Everyone is shocked and angry at the senseless slaughter in Las Vegas last night. Everyone, including gun owners, wants to do something to stop these lunatics. Unfortunately, the leftists immediately jump to another chorus of gun control proposals none of which would have stopped the lunatic last night in Las Vegas.

Already, less than 12 hours since the shooting, Nicholas Kristof wrote an article for the New York Times titled, Preventing Future Mass Shootings Like Las Vegas in which he lays out 8 steps we should take to prevent future Las Vegas shootings. None of the 8 steps would have stopped the shooting in Las Vegas. They all exist today in states around the country. In Nevada, however, their is no permit or registration required for gun ownership and open carry is legal. Again, even changing these laws in Nevada would not have prevented this shooting. Stephen Paddock registered his legal firearms, but the modified automatic firearms are illegal. He could not buy them, he was able to build them from available parts. That too is illegal. Kristof also recycled the Australian gun confiscation process as a solution. This is certainly a process to eliminate the threat of gun violence. It does not eliminate the reality of gun violence in this country. Of the 92/day murdered by guns in this country that Mr. Kristof sites, mass shootings don't make a dent in that number. Chicago style gang and drug related murders are what drive this number. Yet not one of the leftist gun control reactionaries says anything about this type of urban slaughter. A slaughter that can be stopped, if leftist politicians in Chicago want to. As a matter of fact, Mr. Kristof wrote an article pointing this out to his liberal friends about a year ago, Some Inconvenient Gun Facts for Liberals.

Among those he mentions are: We liberals are sometimes glib about equating guns and danger. In fact, it’s complicated: The number of guns in America has increased by more than 50 percent since 1993, and in that same period the gun homicide rate in the United States has dropped by half. Then there are the policies that liberals fought for, starting with the assault weapons ban. A 113-page study found no clear indication that it reduced shooting deaths for the 10 years it was in effect. Move on to open-carry and conceal-carry laws: With some 13 million Americans now licensed to pack a concealed gun, many liberals expected gun battles to be erupting all around us. In fact, the most rigorous analysis suggests that all these gun permits caused neither a drop in crime (as conservatives had predicted) nor a spike in killings (as liberals had expected). Liberals were closer to the truth, for the increase in carrying loaded guns does appear to have led to more aggravated assaults with guns, but the fears were overblown. One of the puzzles of American politics is that most voters want gun regulation, but Congress resists. One poll found that 74 percent even of N.R.A. members favor universal background checks to acquire a gun. Likewise, the latest New York Times poll found that 62 percent of Americans approved of President Obama’s executive actions on guns this month. Could it be, perhaps, that the Times and its fellow travelers know nothing of gun owners beyond the stereotypes they have absorbed?

In truth, there is not a state in America in which criminals obey the carry rules, nor a county in the country where concealed carriers are less law-abiding than the population at large. Unless one somehow believes that gun ownership turns normal people into raging monsters, it is difficult to fathom what the problem is here.

Rush Limbaugh made the following statement today about the Las Vegas shooting. It is a sad, but true commentary, on the situation we face trying to stop deranged mass shooters. "This Las Vegas shooting is absolutely terrifying. This is a cold, calculated killer. And this is the kind of thing that a lot of people either consciously or subconsciously worry about when out in public because you cannot, no matter what you do, secure every building, every window, every rooftop. You can't do it without really restricting the daily ebb and flow and freedom of the population." This is not to say that we should stop looking for creative solutions to the problem. It is to say that we have to accurately define the problem first. The problem is clearly not guns.