More Than Just a Gun Problem

By: Lefty

August 3, 2026

Americans are once again mourning loved ones who did nothing more reckless than go out to eat. At any given moment a mass shooting can occur, and it remains a problem we have not solved. While the details of the Twin Falls shooting are still emerging, one thing is already clear: the shooter, Chad Williams, almost certainly did not buy his weapon behind a gas station.

There is an epidemic of mentally disturbed people walking into gun stores and walking out with a tool that allows them to murder innocent people. Most of us can agree this is fundamentally a mental-health problem. Yet we have taken no meaningful steps to address it, and every serious attempt has fallen on deaf ears.

Why can’t we stop it? How?

The Constitution is clear. But are meaningful steps necessarily contrary to our rights? We register to vote, don’t we? Each state is allowed to tailor that process as it sees fit. You have the right to an attorney, but the state still dictates the qualifications someone must meet to practice law. If the law has long allowed government to regulate other constitutional rights, why is this right treated as uniquely beyond regulation? Is a clean criminal record really the only meaningful check we are willing to accept?

The reason we keep failing is that both political parties have offered only extremist solutions to a very real problem. The left wants to ban guns. That is not reasonable. Gun ownership is a constitutional right, not a privilege. More importantly, the idea fails on its own terms: only honest, law-abiding citizens would surrender their firearms. Criminals and the government would not.

The right’s position is more complicated. Many conservatives recognize that some form of common-sense regulation is needed. Yet they are so afraid of the gun lobby—and of the narrative that any regulation is a slippery slope to confiscation—that nothing ever gets done.

Until both sides abandon their extremes and confront the actual problem—mentally unstable people easily obtaining firearms—ordinary Americans will keep dying for the simple act of going out to eat.