The tiniest sliver of light?

Hot Air has a couple of contributors who have already come out in support of Diane Feinstein's proposed bill to ban the bump stock device that appears to have been used (or intended to be used?) by the Las Vegas killer.

The article says some Republicans are asking why they weren't already banned.  God knows why they would, since as I noted yesterday, Feinstein was suggesting a ban years ago when they first got publicity.  How credible will it be for Republicans to run the line that it was Democrats' fault that it went nowhere?  

Of course, I am not going to hold my breath about this:  American gun lovers' paranoia will come to the fore with its usual BS arguments that there is no point in doing anything ever, because slippery slope and all that.   Like this, in the CSM:

Larry Pratt, emeritus director of Gun Owners of America in Springfield, Va., notes that the Las Vegas mass shooting “is a very unusual situation in many ways, because the bump-stock, this is the first time anybody has ever heard of it being used this way, so to say [banning the device] will solve our crime problems is a bit much.”

In his view, such a push would fit into what he sees as a familiar pattern, where gun control advocates ask for small concessions and then increase their demands – a slippery slope toward more regulations. “I’m not interested in the details about, ‘Oh, this is a particularly vulnerable point and we ought to address it’; no, what they are looking for is any way they can get momentum,” says Mr. Pratt.

“This whole thing with bump-fire stocks, I think it’s funny,” says Wickerham, because they are not a quality add-on. 

“But if this place turns into California [with its strict gun control laws],” he says, “I’m not going to complain; I’ll just leave.”

This whole shooting has the Right scrambling around to try to find the right narrative - first, they had to desperately hope that the killer was a Muslim, or a mad Lefty, because, you know, talking about gun regulation can be avoided if you can just bleat on about how it's all an ideology's fault. 

So instead (thus far) they've had to fall back onto the "pure evil" or "just insane" lines, with the shoulder shrug that you can't do much about that.   On the mental health matter, The Atlantic has an article today making important points:

While improving access to mental-health care might help lots of suffering Americans, researchers who study mass shootings doubt it would do much to curb tragedies like these. According to their work, the sorts of individuals who commit mass murder often are either not mentally ill or do not recognize themselves as such. Because they blame the outside world for their problems, mass murderers would likely resist therapies that ask them to look inside themselves or to change their behavior.

The connection between mental illness and mass shootings is weak, at best, because while mentally ill people can sometimes be a danger to themselves or others, very little violence is actually caused by mentally ill people. When the assailants are mentally ill, the anecdotes tend to overshadow the statistics. Both Jared Loughner, who shot and severely injured Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and the Aurora, Colorado, shooter James Holmes, for example, had histories of mood disorders. But a study of convicted murderers in Indiana found that just 18 percent had a serious mental-illness diagnosis. Killers with severe mental illnesses, in that study, were actually less likely to target strangers or use guns as their weapon, and they were no more likely than the mentally healthy to have killed multiple people....

As Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox has written, in a database of indiscriminate mass shootings—defined as those with four or more victims—compiled by the Stanford Geospatial Center, just 15 percent of the assailants had a psychotic disorder, and 11 percent had paranoid schizophrenia. (Other studies have come to a higher estimate, suggesting about 23 percent of mass killers are mentally ill.)

Certainly, getting those 15 or 23 percent into treatment might chip away at their pathological thinking—and thus their potential future acts of violence. But as Fox argues, linking psychopathic killers with the mental-health system is no easy task. After studying mass shooters for decades, he’s concluded that the killers have more mundane motivations: revenge, money, power, a sense of loyalty, and a desire to foment terror.

The wingnutty Right can't run credibly with the "if only someone in the crowd had a gun" line for this killing - although some are desperate enough to try it.  I'm sure I heard of a woman saying something along the lines of "if only another guest in a nearby room had a gun"    [And, obviously, could work out what was going on and knew how to break down a door.]   Truly, gun nutters like that just live in a fantasy land - and the rest of society pays for it.  

As for Australian wingnutty reactions - they've all been on their usual lines at Catallaxy, and it's a bit boring to repeat them.   Except for sad sack Tom, who seems to be a ex journo with a huge grudge against the industry as it presently is, made this declaration on Monday:

The second US Civil War is now underway.

 As I say, paranoia and the wingnutty Right go hand in hand.

Update:  just how dumb do most of these House Republicans sound?