Growing up in the late 50’s, my Dad was an avid hunter and fisherman, and he had subscriptions to several magazines such as Field & Stream, Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and those magazines all had eight or ten pages at the back that offered stuff for sale.  One of the things that were always for sale was any type of gun and/or ammunition, including WWII and Korean War military surplus “assault rifles”.  These were available by mail order and required no identification whatsoever, much less any type of a background investigation. If you found something you wanted, you simply filled out a short form with what you wanted, the address where you wanted it shipped and included a US Postal money order, and six weeks or so later it would be delivered to your front door by the US Postal Service.  I can remember one advertisement for military surplus M-1 Carbines being offered for $5.00 apiece and they would throw in a 200 round can of ammunition for free.  Interestingly enough, back then nobody ever shot up a school, movie theater or shopping center, but of course, back then we institutionalized people who were mentally ill and who had been determined to be a danger to themselves or others. Then, in 1975 the US Supreme Court made a decision that you cannot incarcerate people indefinitely even though they are a danger to themselves or others. When they did this, it had the net effect of emptying all of the State mental hospitals and single handedly creating the homeless class, which we have been living with ever since, and in virtually every case of a mass shooting, the perpetrators have been determined to have a history of some form of mental illness.  The problem is not the guns, it’s the people who should have been institutionalized in order to put them somewhere that they can’t hurt anyone else.  Also keep in mind that in recent history, the two largest death tolls in single events weren’t the result of gun violence.  The first was the arson fire at the unlicensed Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx in New York City in 1990 that killed 87 people and injured several more using gasoline as the accelerant.  The second was the bombing of the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168 people and injured over 100 more using binary explosives comprised of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and nitro-methane or diesel fuel.  Nobody seems interested in controlling access to gasoline, ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitro-methane or diesel fuel, so why blame guns for what deranged people are doing?