Jul 27, 2015 4 min read

Another summer, another movie theater shooting.

Just days after James Holmes, the unhinged gunman who shot up a movie theater in Colorado in 2012, was found guilty on multiple counts of murder, another shooter who had a long history of mental illness shot patrons at a multiplex in Lafayette, La., showing the Amy Schumer comedy “Trainwreck.” Two people were killed in the incident on Thursday, nine others injured, and the killer took his own life once he realized police were closing in.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a GOP presidential candidate running far back in the pack, proclaimed that “this should never happen anywhere, but you certainly never imagine … it would happen in Louisiana, never imagine it would happen in Lafayette.”

Meanwhile, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, another lagging Republican presidential contender, trotted out the argument that such tragedies would be prevented if only movie patrons looking for a couple of hours of relaxation were packing heat. He proclaimed on CNN Sunday, “These concepts of gun-free zones are a bad idea … I believe that, with all my heart, that if you have the citizens who are well trained, and particularly in these places that are considered to be gun-free zones, that we can stop this kind of activity, or stop it before there’s as many people impacted as what we saw in Lafayette.”

Both comments deserve some scrutiny. First, it’s tough to envision anyone outside of law enforcement, whether they’ve been trained or not, being able to gun down a deranged killer in a dark movie theater. The shooter might, like Holmes in Colorado three years ago, be wearing body armor and firing a semi-automatic rifle that can hold 100 rounds. As if anyone needs to be reminded, we live in a country where such weapons are easy for the unstable to gain access to. And multiple people trying to “neutralize” a crazed killer, who has the element of surprise on his side, are likely to injure or kill other innocents along the way. Such a scenario, in fact, brings to mind a scene from a movie – in this case, the chaotic saloon battle in the beloved 1939 Western “Dodge City.”

Besides, do we really want to live in a society where everyone feels like they need to be armed as they go about their daily lives? It sounds less like the “land of the free” than a sour, paranoid banana republic that no one would want to live in or visit.

And though Jindal deserves credit for suggesting on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” Sunday that other states should follow Louisiana’s example and run information on gun buyers through the federal background check system before they make their purchases, Jindal has been a reliable and predictable champion of lax gun laws. He has an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association. There’s no reason that Lafayette, La., should be immune from this kind of mass shooting. As we’ve seen all too frequently, senseless, large-scale slaughter can happen in the most unlikely places, from an elementary school to a college campus or a military base. It should also be noted that Louisiana has one of the highest murder rates in the country, about double the per capita average of the United States as a whole. The abundance of poverty in Louisiana almost certainly plays a part, but so do the state’s gun laws – they were ranked the fifth-weakest in the United States according to a 2012 study by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Volence.

While it’s true mass shootings have happened in other countries in recent years, most notably in Scotland in 1996 and Norway in 2011, leaders in those societies had every right to say they couldn’t imagine such killings happening there, because those countries have laws that prevent the easy proliferation of guns. Until we tighten our own laws, mass shootings will be all too easy to imagine and, when it comes down to it, simply business as usual.