This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 8th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown. The conversation about guns becomes familiar following mass shootings. The problem with many ideas

so often repeated after these tragic events is that, as Cato's Trevor Burris points out,

gun policy is hard. It is unfortunate that when these kinds of events happen

that everybody jumps immediately to their preferred policy prescription and so many of these just ignore a whole lot of

complicating factors is that fair to say? Absolutely it's these tragic events

happen and the first thing we usually start talking about is the gun, which is unfortunate because that tends to take up most of the air in the room where of course people will talk about video games and mental health and things like this,

but the gun is not the primary cause of mass shootings and that is quite clear.

We can have reasonable debates about where on the margins gun control can be effective, but mass shooters are not on the margins of crime.

They are highly motivated criminals who live in a country with 300 million guns and if you take every AR 15 and hit a

magic button and they all disappear into a puff of smoke you will not have stopped

any mass shooting.

Now, the question could be, have you lowered possibly the fatality count?

Well, that depends on a few things.

And one thing I don't like getting into on these subjects, but we kind of end up having to is to talk about sort of the nitty gritty details of different guns that can be used to do this kind of mayhem.

But suffice it to say that guns kill people, pistols kill people, rifles kill people, they all can kill people,

and any one of them can be used to do a mass shooting.

The real vexing question here is that, you know, the first major mass shooting that people talk about is the Charles Whitman

mass shooting in the University of Texas where he was in the tower and that was in the mid-60s.

At that time before the Gun Control Act of 1968, you could order an AR-15 through the mail without

any background checks or clearance whatsoever, and there weren't these type of mass shootings.

So at a time when guns were less control than they are now in terms of regulations,

...