We can presumably agree that there's more legal civilian-owned firearms in the US than ever before, yet the national homicide rate has steadily decreased since the 90s https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-30/chicago Bump stocks were first sold in 2010, yet the homicide rate has still slowly declined since then. How does any of this match up with your belief that more firearms owned by civilians, higher capacity magazines available for civilian use, and even the invention and sale of lesser-known (until recently) novelty firearm accessories such as bump stocks lead to increased violent firearm crime?
Your argument is equivalent to the guy holding a snowball and arguing that global warming obviously can't be real.
Actually, it hasn't (at least for school shootings) despite the impression you'd get from the media. See the link I posted before:
http://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/schools-are-still-one-o...
And if you don't think high muzzle speed and high capacity magazines increase effectiveness (read: ability to kill more school children faster) then you'd better let our military know.
It really takes willful ignorance to pretend that having higher numbers of more effective killing tools has nothing to do with deaths.
maybe this indicates that it's not the firearms themselves that are the problem
And again. The incredibly simplistic way of thinking. The problem? There are many problems! Properly addressing this would take many solutions. Mental health problems are fundamental to our species and may never be completely be eradicated, but we can do better.
One problem that is not fundamental to our species is the easy access to weapons of war. But we do like our toys, don't we.
School shootings are rare. Cop murders are rare. No one thinks anyone with a rifle is likely to do these things.
The point, instead, is that in a world full of assault rifles and high capacity magazines and bump stocks, more of these types of things will happen and they will be worse when they do.
This is not rocket science. If it was legal to own RPGs, some people would. And the more people did, the more crazy RPG-related shit would happen. And when we're grieving over a 50 death incident, we'll never be able to prove (to a degree that would convince a member of the National RPG Association) that it would have been 15 if RPGs had been illegal.