I believe there will always be unfortunate outcomes with many of our freedoms and rights. I do not want to see guns banned, I understand that because we have them sometimes innocent people will die. And that's awful and we should take good common sense steps to reduce that as much as possible, in a perfect world murder would be eliminated. But we should not overly restrict freedoms in an attempt to save lives.
I think this quote by Ben Franklin sums up my feelings on the subject: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Now be done with me, I'd like that. You've added nothing but a feet stomping tantrum. Tomorrow I'll again be here to point out how many more INNOCENT people have died from smoking compared to guns and this massacre, and how the left doesn't really care or bring up this much bigger killer nearly as much as they bring up firearms. Your objective is to get rid of guns, you don't care about saving lives.
First, that Franklin quote has long been
ripped out of its original context: it was actually discussing a family's refusal to pay taxes and the risk it was posing to the new country. The "safety" they were trying to purchase was financial safety, and they were hurting the "essential liberty" of the US (that is, its ability to defend itself) by trying to skimp on taxes. There is an inadvertent nugget of wisdom in there, but it's actually arguing in favor of more deference to government and the greater good, not "don't tread on me" individualism.
And sorry, but it is absolutely false that the left "doesn't really care" about other issues like smoking. If you'll recall, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act was signed by Obama in 2009. The difference is that something like smoking is a voluntary act, there's already plenty of sensible regulation, and smoking is overall
on a sharp decline. We're not focused on that situation
because it's getting visibly better.
Meanwhile, mass shootings are on the rise (a rate of nearly one per day so far in 2017), there are still too many 'ordinary' shootings, and the lethality of shootings is going up. And importantly, this is death that isn't even remotely voluntary. None of the victims in Las Vegas went to that concert expecting to be shot. It might have been difficult to prevent Paddock from shooting people, but he sure as hell wouldn't have shot so many of them if he'd been barred from both stockpiling that many guns (particularly semi-auto rifles) and equipping them with bump stocks to make them pseudo-automatic.
Contrary to what you assume, many on the left don't want to get rid of all guns (there are some that do, of course). And many of us know that it will be impossible to completely avoid innocent deaths so long as the right to own a gun exists. But that doesn't mean that existing legislation is fine, or that any and all casualties are just the unavoidable price of freedom. That's what's frustrating about your point of view: you're acting as if there's absolutely nothing more that can be done without resorting to a total ban on guns, which is patently false. You're not even allowing the possibility of questioning whether or not those casualties are acceptable.
What's worse is that you don't even seem to realize how your opinion is the result of incomplete, highly filtered information. Why have the NRA and the politicians it pays off been blocking research into gun violence for the past couple of decades, I wonder? Oh, right: because if people were allowed to learn more about the causes of gun violence and how to prevent it, you'd see many more people asking for tighter regulation. If an organization pours so much energy into preventing research that might challenge their ideology, you have to ask whether or not their ideology is the right one.