So what if it's the person? How can you find those people and stop them from getting guns? All the people who knew the shooter in the Oregon mall shooting a couple days ago said that he showed no signs of being anything other than a kind and friendly person. He showed only a marginal interest in guns. But that could describe hundreds of millions of Americans. You would never be able to find the ones that might do this and make sure they don't get guns.
Ultimately it's impossible to be knowledgeable of the bad intentions of every single warped individual on the planet. And some of those folks will have the capability of harming people, perhaps many people. Look at 9/11 as an example of how a handful of well trained and highly motivated individuals armed with only box cutters were able to take control of jumbo jets and ram them into buildings and kill thousands. That's an extreme example but it's worth remembering, because there are many, many examples of similar situations. Look at the unabomber, for example. A brilliant loner who was able to fashion bombs from household materials in a shack in the middle of nowhere and kill several people. Or look at all of the other bombers throughout history. You can't legislate away the ability to build bombs, they're already illegal, but anyone with enough knowledge and a little money can make them and kill people. The same goes for arson, which kills hundreds of people every year.
In my view the solution is not to try to disempower the entire populace by taking away guns and hoping that this disempowers the bad guys enough to make it that much harder for them to kill. I think that the better solution is to empower responsible individuals to act in their own self-defense and in the defense of others. I think it's also worth concentrating on social and cultural changes which make our society more accepting and hopefully make the creation of these violent individuals less common, but that's a much harder problem to tackle.
Actually, I see 9/11 as an example of TLAs refusing to share information when doing that could have easily stopped the hijackers long before they could do anything. I also see it as something the US brought upon itself with its dependence on oil and constant meddling in the Middle East. So I don't think it's a very good analogy for mass shootings by (usually insane, or at least disturbed) white US citizens.
And just because you can't stop all crime doesn't mean you shouldn't stop any crime. There are simple steps that can be taken. For example, the sales of guns at gun shows needs to be stopped immediately. Ex-felons should not be able to get guns. There are a lot of holes in gun control law that could be easily closed if it weren't for people like you making it political suicide for any politician to even suggest that we need stricter gun control laws.
> I think that the better solution is to empower responsible individuals to act in their own self-defense and in the defense of others.
How would you propose to "empower" elementary school children? How about people in a mall or movie theater were the possession of firearms is not allowed?