Emotions understandably run high after events where innocent people are murdered, and they run even higher when such occurrences happen on a mass scale and make national news. But that doesn’t alleviate our responsibility as citizens in a democratic society to vote, voice our opinions to our government and discuss the issues with each other rationally. 

It was only minutes after the news broke about Las Vegas that the calls for gun control started flying in the news and social media. “#GunControlNow” was trending on Twitter, Facebook rants were flying, TV news anchors and night show hosts were demanding Congress act. They all seemed to demand gun control but few named anything specific, and the few that did didn’t articulate how what they wanted would prevent the next tragedy and save lives by citing supporting evidence. Is it because the facts don’t support gun control as a viable solution as easily as emotions lead us to believe? Evidence from places with much tougher gun laws should give us some insight. 

France has no Second Amendment, no NRA or politicians in its pocket, and extremely controlled civilian gun ownership, as they have laws that go beyond what’s often championed as “reasonable gun restrictions” and “common sense gun control” by advocates here in the U.S.

Yet in November of 2015, gunmen conducted an attack with fully automatic assault rifles, along with explosives, all illegal in France, killing 130 people and wounding 350-400. France also had one of the deadliest mass killings on record with the July 2016 truck attack in Nice, where 84 innocent people were crushed to death with an ice cream truck, more than lost to gunfire in Vegas.

Germany also has many of the gun control regulations people have suggested the U.S. adopt, yet had a gunman take hostages at a theater in June of 2016 before police shot him. In 2002 a gunman opened fire at a high school killing 16 people, and in 2009 a gunman killed 15 people in another mass shooting that started at a school.

China and Japan have no legal civilian gun ownership yet in 2014 China had a mass killing where 33 people were murdered with another 130 injured in a knife attack, and in 2016 Japan had a mass killing where 15 people were killed with another 45 injured again with a knife.

Australia and the U.K. are often held up as examples for the U.S. to follow, but a closer look at their gun murder vs. all violent crime and occurrence rates by date show us it’s not an apples to apples comparison and there were negative effects of disarming their citizens. Not to mention both countries have had public terrorist attacks in recent years. Even the highly restrictive gun laws and outright gun bans these countries have did not keep innocent people in these countries safe from public mass murder. 

Gun control hasn’t stopped mass casualty attacks in Europe, Asia or elsewhere, and as shown in France it doesn’t even stop mass shootings with banned assault weapons! Let alone knives, bombs or improvised weapons like ice cream trucks which can be used in the absence of a gun. So why is gun control the popular mantra for here in the U.S. after something like this happens? Politics. 

Using the emotional state of anger, shock and grief people feel from the mass murder of innocent people to push for policies and legislation for which there is no hard evidence to support the notion said polices would or could have prevented it from occurring in the first place is the grossest sort of emotionalism.

It’s regurgitated by those in positions of power shamelessly looking to cash in on the political capital of post-tragedy public distress knowing people are desperate for something, and it’s believed by those so overcome by their distress, anger, shock, grief and in many cases political bias, they fail to bother and see if what’s being pushed stands up to the facts before jumping on the bandwagon.

We need to pay our respects to the dead and wounded in Las Vegas by facing the complicated task of addressing all the issues that contribute to mass public attacks, from mental health to national and event security, to terrorism and label the murderer as the feckless coward he was to deter copycats.

This, instead of following the lead of those shamelessly using the Vegas victims as political pawns to further an agenda propped up with easy and emotionally satisfying but factually unsupported answers. Good public policy is never just a form of therapy that makes us feel better about an issue while disregarding reality. If there was a comprehensive list of all the problems that have been successfully addressed by celebrity emotional diatribes and the cheap political theater of elected officials looking to exploit grief for popularity it would be a blank page.