“Why did he even have a gun?” — it’s a common refrain in America, often after mass shootings by people who legally aren’t supposed to have firearms.
One of the worst recent examples was the massacre in a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church last November, in which 26 people were killed by a man whose domestic violence conviction should have barred him from buying guns.
It happened again a week later, when a man in Rancho Tehama, Calif., killed four people and shot up the outside of a school. He, too, had been ordered to give up his guns, but verification of his compliance was left to the “honor system.”
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