When another mass shooting occurs, or when the subject of gun control returns to the news, nearly always one thing, the gun is missing.
There are two ways to think about violence, whether from highway crashes or from a handgun.
We can concentrate on the individual incident and ask why, and we can examine a series of incidents of gun violence or death, and explores why these various incidents occur and why.
But decades ago Ralph Nader and Dr. William Haddon Jr. took up the same issue, along with other forms of violence, like highway traffic crashes, airline disaster, and so forth.
Dr. Haddon decided to shift attention to these incidents within their societal context. He noted that gun violence and highway traffic crashes were near always focused on the individual or individuals involved, and the principal question that arose was what did these individuals do wrong? This focus on the individual is wrong, for several reasons.
There is another way to think about these incidents. We can reduce the numbers of the incidents and hope education will produce progress.
We can make guns less lethal, or we can reduce the number of guns and the occasions of gun violence with a variety of measures, from taxation to regulation to making guns less lethal.
Either way we can think less about whether gun control would have prevented this accident and more about how to reduce the rate of these tragedies.