To have a productive response to our nation’s problems w/gun crime, we need to start with some non-paranoid, good faith assumptions of each other.

The average gun-rights proponent doesn’t want to take everybody’s guns. And the average 2A advocate isn’t OK with people being shot.

Start with the thing that almost everybody agrees on:

We don’t want the people who commit these atrocities to have access to guns.

Basically everybody agrees with this goal. Right?

Then walk backwards from there. How do we identify the behavioral commonalities that these people share and how can we mitigate the risk while abiding by our Constitution, which does allow us to bear arms?

You look at the DATA.

We need to look at what these people do before they use a gun to kill people. Find ways to catch the warning signs we’re missing. And make changes to make sure we catch them going forward.

Plane crashes aren’t political. When a plane goes down, they examine every aspect of what led to the crash. The crew. The aircraft. The weather. Everything is examined.

And when they find things that could have prevented the crash, those things become new policies.

We don’t do that with shootings. We don’t examine what happened and figure out how to keep it from happening again. Instead, we just yell at each other. And then we retreat into our tribes and let it happen again.

When planes crash, we also don’t just jump to sweeping generalizations. When a jet crashes, we don’t just jump up and ban jets. We do a detailed analysis. Maybe there’s an issue with a specific type of jet. Or maybe it’s how the people who fly it are trained.

And as a consequence of us doing these detailed investigations and then changing policies based on what we find out, planes don’t keep crashing over and over again for the same reasons.

We need to do that with mass shootings.