That's where passing one of those 'common sense' gun reforms would likely make a large difference. The 'gun show loophole' as it is commonly referred to is, in reality, just unregulated private sales. People can buy guns online, in person, or used at a gunshow (new sales still need to pass background checks) completely unregulated.
The irony is, there is already a system in place for when people purchase new guns online. Someone orders the gun and the site ships it to an FFA dealer that confirms identity and runs the background check. This could easily be expanded to private sales ubiquitously while also bringing more money into small businesses.
There is no possible way of keeping 300+ million legal guns out of the hands of bad people, but make the punishments extremely severe for selling a weapon without an FFA dealer and it will reduce the likelihood.
I've always taken a pocketbook stance on it, in that I think gun owners should be required to have insurance on their weapons that kicks in if the weapon is stolen. If it's determined by your insurance company that you weren't securing your weapon, then they won't cover damages (which would include any damage as a result of the weapon being stolen).
there are plenty of ideas that will possibly help, from smart guns, to a proper database tracking sales of registered firearms... which you can then use to actually enforce straw purchase or lax storage requirements... or a waiting period for all purchases and transfers, since the last few mass shootings all had gun purchases a few days before the shootings.
Nothing is going to stop them all, and i'm not one who believes in repealing the 2nd amendment, but there are a lot of good things to at least makes things a bit.. harder, or hold people a bit more accountable for what other people do with their guns
And agreeing with antraxsuicide, most responsible gun owners thing open carry is crazy because you become a target. You open carry a rifle and i think you really need a mental health evaluation
I'm in favor of gun control measures (pretty much all of them). I think my main point is that liberals (probably due to being very technocratic right now, which I like) tend to bring up arguments against gun control often with GOP talking points, which are frequently semantic. A huge pet peeve of mine is when liberals pull out the "there's no such thing as an assault weapon" line. Who fucking cares?
We should be using the GOP playbook on abortion for guns. Any way to reduce them should be a win, but we undercut ourselves so much before coming to the national stage with a plan.
In terms of preventing mass shooting I still firmly believe that most mass shooters have personality indicators and we should actually just be trying to identify and monitor or even control people with tendencies towards domestic violence, impulse control, brittle self-images, etc. Those are the people who go out and shoot people. Also maybe figuring out why we're producing so many of these people (although I suspect we always did and we just used to get rid of them by sending them to war or whatever).
I had the idea that we should have a linked database for gun ownership that also connects to county clerk offices so that if a gun owner files for divorce or county bills start piling up, the gov't could then move with caution that this person may be unstable.
One of the major issues with our "mental health" arguments is that we use super circular logic for it. "Someone killed a bunch of people, they must be crazy." And how do we know they were crazy? "They killed a bunch of people." But honestly? It's super easy to imagine a perfectly stable person turning into an active shooter if they happen to run into a shitty set of circumstances.
If you lose your job (which I'm unclear on how the govt would know that quickly), lose a family member, or get divorced, there should be a reaction from the state to help you adjust to that stress. And it doesn't mean you're insane. So I really like this personality argument.