For the liberal, every societal problem has a state-issued remedy waiting to be administered over the objections of a reactionary Republican. But just because you have a tremendous amount of emotion and frustration built up around a certain cause doesn’t make your favored legislation any more practical, effective or realistic. It doesn’t change the fact that owning a gun is a civil right, that the preponderance of owners are not criminals, or that there are 300 million guns out there.

And if it’s a political argument you’re offering—and when hasn’t it been?—you’ll need more than the vacuousness of the “this is bad and so we have to do something.” That’s because anti-gun types are never able to answer a simple question: what law would you pass that could stop these shootings?

Many liberals see the Second Amendment as tragically misinterpreted or useless and guns as abhorrent, so they do not believe any legislative imposition is a tradeoff—even an ineffective law. Many conservatives view guns as a civil right, so this an unacceptable tradeoff. Some don’t even view mass shooting as primarily a gun problem.