-shakes head- All the calls for “gun control” that will magically stop all mass shootings miss the mark. Let me tell you a secret: Addressing the problem with victim-disarming gun control laws won’t hack it.

Background checks, however “enhanced” won’t do it, because looking at past activities doesn’t predict with certainty what someone might do in the future, under changing conditions.

Same with ex parte “red flag” confiscations.

“Assault weapon” bans? Most mass shootings are committed with handguns.

Age limits? What; you’re going to raise age limits to 70? 80?

Licensing? Registration? See above, re:background checks.

Buybacks? That never works; just ask New Zealand, with its 6.45% compliance rate. Buybacks don’t even touch the probable five million plus stolen guns in the wild.

There is only one gun control act that would possibly prevent mass shootings: Total confiscation of all firearms. Not just civilian arms, but everything; police and military (ask Los Zetas where they really got their “military-grade” weaponry; it wasn’t US gun stores). Then you’d have to ban pipes, aluminum cans, iron, copper, nails, sugar, stump remover, fertilizer, propane, butane, lighter fluid, gasoline, charcoal briquets, and any and all chemical precursors to homemade propellant. You’ll shut down all industry and commercial agriculture in America. The country, and much of the world, will starve.

Ever hear of linacs and railguns? There goes electricity, no matter how “greenly” it’s generated. Since you already eliminated plumbing, cities are now uninhabitable.

To enforce all that, you’ll need to raid every structure and property in the nation, going over every inch with metal detectors, ground penetrating radar, chemical sniffers, and Mark I Eyeballs.

Then you’ll need watchmen-watchers to keep an eye on the confiscation teams, because those are just people, too.

And someone to watch them.

You’ll need to recruit every man, woman, and child in the country as snitches, so that someone is always watching everyone who might be creatively assembling concrete, wire, flour, piss, flint, and steel to build an improvised cannon. (Crappy, but it would work.)

You’ll need to ban knowledge of history, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, lest someone apply that to construct a firearm. So much for maintaining infrastructure, let alone creating more.

Literacy will have to go, to be sure someone doesn’t wrong-ideas from an old book that missed being 451’d.

This is the 21st century; the firearms cat is out of the bag. If you want to use gun control to stop shootings, you need to reduce the nation to a sparsely populated Stone Age society.

Have fun with that. Or maybe you’d like to look at things that might really help.

[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited, and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]