The Truth About Mass Shootings: Restrictive Gun Laws Did Nothing to Stop the FSU Shooter

Besides being an unspeakable crime, Thursday’s shootings at Florida State University in Tallahassee reinforced one invaluable lesson:

Supposedly well-meaning laws aimed at stopping what leftists prefer to call “gun violence” are about as useful against criminals as cloth masks are against an infinitesimally small and potentially deadly virus.

They don’t do the job, but they make ideologues feel good about themselves.

As noted by the Tallahassee Democrat — the daily newspaper whose editorial bias almost always lives up to its name — Florida is generally considered an “actively pro-gun state,” but it’s one with a raft of restrictions on firearms possession.

In the wake of the 2018 Parkland high school shooting that killed 17 (and gifted the nation the perpetually irritating David Hogg), Sunshine State lawmakers passed a measure limiting gun purchases to those 21 years of age or older.

And as the Democrat also noted, Florida outlaws gun possession on college campuses.

Tallahassee gunman Phoenix Ikner is 20 years old, but had a weapon he reportedly stole from his mother, a veteran Leon County sheriff’s deputy, per CNN.

He was armed on FSU’s campus because he wanted to be, and he clearly didn’t care what a law had to say about it, nor did he care about laws against murder, for that matter. He ignored them.

So how, exactly, did the restrictive gun laws that exist in Florida actually apply to a situation where an obviously diseased mind had decided to commit murder?

The answer, much as gun grabbers won’t like it, is, in short, that they didn’t. And they don’t. And they won’t.

That is reality.

Reality, of course, won’t change the ineluctable urge in leftists to violate constitutional rights to fit how they would prefer the world to look. (These are men and women, after all, who pretend that there’s no difference between men and women that a scalpel can’t fix.)

The blood had barely dried in Tallahassee before anti-gun activists were using it to press their case — like Shannon Watts, founder of anti-gun group Moms Demand Action, who took to the social media platform X with posts like this:

As a horrific mass shooting unfolds at FSU, a reminder that Florida:

Does not require background checks or training
Does not regulate assault weapons
Does not limit magazine capacity
Became a permitless carry state in 2023

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) April 17, 2025

Note that her points — that Florida doesn’t require background checks on firearms purchase, does not regulate “assault weapons,” does not limit magazine capacity, and allows permitless carry — had literally nothing to do with the situation unfolding at FSU.

Fortunately, there were plenty of users on social media displaying a little more knowledge — and intellectual honesty.

Hey, remind me, where do these shootings occur?

Hey, I wonder if FSU stopped students from carrying on campus. Let’s see.https://t.co/wIu37jRmmM

Oh.

— TruthHunter (@TruthHunter7778) April 17, 2025

But facts are not the point for the left.

It’s the same end of the political spectrum that trampled American constitutional rights to freedom of speech and freedom of worship during the lockdowns, while deliberately fostering the illusion that masks too big to stop a virus were crucial to stopping a virus.

They are the side that promulgated the “social distancing” standard of six feet for safety that Americans took seriously — without knowing that it had basically been a gut guess from somewhere — and not even Anthony Fauci could remember where.

Their gun control fetish in ways is actually worse than the totalitarian tendencies that became so evident during COVID.

While wearing a mask might have been useful only as an exercise in virtue-signaling, creating “gun-free zones” that are supposed to be safe is actually the best way to provide a deranged killer with helpless targets.

As is clear from the writings of murderers like Buffalo, New York, supermarket gunman Payton Gendron and Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale, the likelihood that none of their intended victims would be able to shoot back was a key part of choosing where they would attack.

And as is clear from the day-to-day realities of American life, a state’s gun control laws are far from a solid indicator of how “safe” that state’s residents are from “gun violence.” (Just look at Democrat-infested Illinois.)

Conservatives don’t support the Second Amendment because it gives obvious nut cases like Ikner a chance to kill innocent human beings. They support it because the founders, in a wisdom that came from brutal experience, understood that ensuring the population would never be disarmed was the best way to ensure that the population would never be enslaved.

The tradeoff is that there are countless crazed, depraved, evil human beings out there who are hellbent on hurting their fellow man, who may have easier access to firearms. That is an unfortunate reality.

But if it weren’t guns, it would be knives. Or poison. Or explosives. (The worst school massacre in U.S. history remains the 1927 bombing of Bath Consolidated School in Bath, Michigan.)

None of that will change the contemptibly predictable response from Democratic lawmakers and the establishment media to the Tallahassee murders, demanding more action that will prevent exactly nothing.

But conservatives and other sane Americans need to remember that when leftists are feeling good about themselves through virtue signaling, they’re generally doing bad to the rest of the country.

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