BY MARCUS EMMEL
A man wearing dark clothes and a baseball cap walked into the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, California. After setting off smoke bombs to create confusion, he shot the security guard at the entrance and opened fire into the crowd. People dropped to the ground, dove under tables, hid in bathrooms and ran for exits, stepping over bodies sprawled across the floor. All this happened yesterday, November 8, 2018. Just last year, several of the patrons in the bar were in Las Vegas, at the country music festival where 58 people were killed in the worst mass shooting in modern American history. When the gunman opened fire at the festival in Las Vegas, Telemachus Orfano somehow survived. On Wednesday night, he didn't.
This shooting, the 307th mass shooting of 2018, marks yet another tragic reminder of the crisis facing Americans: guns. The mother of Telemachus Orfanos, Susan Orfanos, spoke to The New York Times in an telephone interview, saying, "He was killed last night at Borderline..." her voice was filled with sadness, "He made it through Las Vegas, he came home. And he didn't come home last night, and the two words I want you to write are: Gun control. Right now -- so that no one else goes through this. Can you do that? Can you do that for me? Gun control." He made it through Las Vegas, he came home. And he didn't come home last night, and the two words I want you to write are: Gun control.
This attack is only the latest in a wave of mass shootings that have plagued the country this year. A man opened fire at a Pittsburgh synagogue in late October, killing 11. On November 2nd, a man opened fire in a yoga studio in Florida, killing 2 and injuring 5. For far too long, those who oppose gun reforms have said that nothing can be done to stem the violence. Those claims are demonstrably wrong.
The Las Vegas massacre. The shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. The movie theater shooting in Aurora, CO. The Virginia Tech Slaughter. The massacre at the Texas First Baptist Church. These are the five highest-casuality mass shootings in modern American history. What did they all have in common? Semi-automatic weapons that allowed the shooter to fire into crowds without reloading. They should be banned, right? Well, there's a problem. Based on the evidence collected over the past 20 years, banning these weapons probably won't do much to influence overall gun deaths. We know this because in 1994, Congress passed legislation to outlaw the sale of certain types of semi-automatic guns and large-capacity magazines, and the effect was not impressive. Gun homicide rates declined during the ban, but they also rose again after the ban expired in 2004. One federally funded study of the ban found that the effect was insignificant partly because it was full of loopholes. Experts say focusing on reducing large-capacity machines might be more effective. Simply put, gunmen are less deadly when they have to reload. But such a ban may take time to have an effect. But it would be worth it. Again mass shootings only account for a small piece of the puzzle, so any ban on these weapons and magazines would result in small improvements at best. But even if this step reduced shootings by 1 percent, that would mean 650 fewer people shot a year. Isn't that worth it?
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