Every time there is another shooting incident and it doesn’t result in a huge raft of new gun laws, liberals are left scratching their heads. What’s wrong with all of you people? Actually, they tend to more often ask what’s wrong with Congress and why they won’t “listen to the people” and pass more gun restrictions so we can put an end to these mass shootings once and for all. To minimize future migraines for them, they may want to check out the latest numbers from the Washington Post and ABC News.

They asked the question… Do you think that mass shootings in this country are more a reflection of problems identifying and treating people with mental health problems or inadequate gun control laws?

Looking at the response, all I can say is that there aren’t as many dumb people in the country as I may have feared.


But while many have called for stricter gun laws in their wake, the Post-ABC poll finds far more point to problems treating people with mental health issues. By a more than 2-to-1 margin, more people say mass shootings reflect problems identifying and treating people with mental health problems rather than inadequate gun control laws (63 percent to 23 percent).

There are wide partisan divisions on this issue; 82 percent of Republicans say shootings reflect a failure to identify and treat people with mental health problems, compared with 65 percent of independents and 46 percent of Democrats.

It’s worth noting the wording of not just the question, but the possible answers offered. Respondents were not given a simple binary choice here. They were given the option of taking the easy way out and saying “both” are the cause, but even with that escape hatch offered only ten percent were inclined to even partially blame a lack of gun laws. That makes this a much more definitive sample than simply asking people to choose one from column A or column B.

They also asked another question which has been going around for ages and (by a still very narrow margin) more people feel that it’s important to protect the right to own guns than to pass new gun control laws.

Does this solve some of the mystery for the DNC and Michael Bloomberg and nearly everyone in Hollywood? You aren’t getting new laws passed to stop mass shootings because guns don’t commit mass shootings. Crazy people do. You might want to craft a platform where you actually help communities recognize when people are going off the rails and do something to help them. Find the root cause of the problem, no matter how daunting, and get to work on that instead of blaming everything on a tool. Of course, I will make one exception to that suggestion.

By all means, Hillary Clinton should run on a gun confiscation platform. You go, girl.