It is perfectly well-known how to avoid such things: Stronger gun control to raise the difficulty of achieving death of others; state-enforced education levels with low to zero cost. Sadly these things run counter to the convictions of a loud enough part of the US population that they cannot usefully be implemented.
Often, people like this don't have the right to bear arms. It's not described whether the victim was a permanent resident but considering when he graduated from college, I think it's reasonable to say that he wasn't.
Being an Indian national, he would have had to have waited 8 years or more to become a permanent resident. In that time, he would have had his visa renewed repeatedly. His visa is likely to have been an H1-B.
I suppose, then, the questions are: Are you in favour of foreigners in America bearing arms? Or are you in favour of a faster permanent residency process?
Both of those things are the only real way that the victim could have legally carried a firearm.
I am in favor of legal immigrants carrying arms provided they can pass all the other legal requirements for ownership and carry.
Even still, it need not be just the intended target victim that is armed. You need a critical mass of enough bystanders having the capability to defend others. That is the only way to provide a chance at an effective defense as well as a strong psychological deterrent.
Not sure what you're saying. Every place in the world has shootings and mass killings, not just the US. They're all marked by the same tragic feature - the total inability of the victims to defend themselves.
I understand, but in the developed world, every country with lower murder rates than the US (nearly all of them) has stricter gun laws, and in most cases much stricter. There is a somewhat rough relationship between stricter gun control and lower violent crime rates, which is the opposite of what you would expect if violent criminals were encouraged by defenseless civilians.
Also, there are instances in the US and elsewhere of shootings on places like military bases where everyone is armed, and many cases where the shooter planned for a confrontation with armed police. It might seem counter-intuitive, but much like the death penalty does not seem to be an effective deterrent for murderers, I don't see much evidence that armed civilians are an effective deterrent for murderers. I think murderers in general just don't think very logically.
The core question I'm asking is, why is gun control so effective in every other developed country? Why don't murder rates increase when gun control increases and ordinary people can't defend themselves?
Edit: Also, I want to address this claim:
> They're all marked by the same tragic feature - the total inability of the victims to defend themselves.
This is not always true. For a recent example, look at the shooting in Dallas. The victims were all armed, as were many civilians in the area:
> [The Dallas police chief] said 20 to 30 people, some of them wearing camouflage, showed up at the peaceful Black Lives Matter protest carrying AR-15 rifles and such items as gas masks, ammunition gear and bulletproof vests. “Doesn’t make sense to us,” he said, “but that’s their right in Texas,” where people can legally carry long firearms in public.
> Those people “began to run” when the shooting started, Brown said. “For our officers, they were suspects” until any involvement in the deadly sniper attack could be ruled out, he added.
There's shootings like the 2011 one in Tucson, Arizona, where very lenient concealed carry laws did not seem to deter the shooter.
There are also instances of crimes being stopped by civilians with guns, I just want to point out that "all mass killings are marked by this feature" is not true.
It's not an uncommon belief in the US. Whenever a school shooting occurs or other mass shooting occurs, Americans come out in droves to blame it on gun control, and insist that the solution to gun violence is more guns in the hands of the "right" people.
Events like that tend to lead Americans to buy more guns and ammo in anticipation of stricter gun control laws, rather than consider whether the proliferation of guns contributes to the problem at all.
