This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 15, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The conversations that dominate following a mass killing in the United States

tend to focus on not how to deal with the motivations of those

killers but on what procedures might have a small marginal impact on those kinds of

horrendous acts. Trevor Burris, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, offers a different conversation.

When it comes to terrorism, our foreign policy colleagues here at the Cato Institute like to focus on why those things occur and

this seemed to be an act of lone wolf terrorism, somebody who is not as far as anybody knows, actually connected with ISIS.

He swore fealty to them and then killed a bunch of people, but there's no clear connection.

But he obviously felt motivated.

It's time to broaden the conversation as you said to what makes people do things like this.

The worst thing that happens in the gun control debate, which we can have a reasonable debate

about gun control, but unfortunately we tend to have it after mass shootings, which are the

most difficult thing to prevent just via gun control because we have highly motivated people who will not be,

he will not be encumbered to commit a mass shooting by a paper barrier or a background check or things like this.

So if we're going to have a match shootings discussion and not a gun control discussion, we

should be discussing why people commit mass shootings.

And it's an interesting thing because they are kind of going up.

It depends.

It's hard to say they're going up probably.

It's a pretty low trend line though, so the next five years we might not see any, so then the whole thing might change.

But it seems that they're going up, even talk about like the 50s.

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