So it's like Batman riding a unicorn?

Look, I'm not always great with metaphors, but what I want to know is this just a "just power through it" thing? Like, is there an amount of armed people, a threshold beyond which mass shootings won't happen anymore? Is that their logic here?

"I mean, at some point there are so many guns that everyone's dead,
so I guess that would mean fewer shootings. You know, moving forward..."

-Some mathematician

More guns and fewer doors?
Wait, have I got that right?

I ask because I think the takeaway, the gist, if you will, from the Republican reaction to the Uvalde and Buffalo shootings is that more guns will make things better. They even had a whole NRA convention with Trump and Gregg Abbott and Ted Cruz where they complained about how the rest of us are politicizing mass shootings. Which, I mean, no. Of course they don't get the irony. They are beyond irony. Anyway, the idea is that if more people are armed, then random citizens hearing a mass shooting in progress, will lock and load and save the day.

Except no. There was an armed guard at the grocery store in Buffalo. He was shot and killed. And the cops in Uvalde didn't even go in for like forty minutes so, here we are. According to people who read the Second Amendment as some kind of divine carte blanc to own firearms, the only criteria should be being alive and American. But if the Second Amendment said everyone could own a plane--which was about as likely as James Madison thinking of automatic weapons--wouldn't we want everyone to get a pilot's license as well?

"What in God's name is an air-plane? Automatic weapons?
What...wha-Who are you people? Are you--are you a witch?"

-James Madison when pressed on the

intended scope of the Second Amendment 

Say it with me now: Owning a
cape doesn't make you Batman.

The point is owning a gun, or even the right to own a gun, doesn't make one qualified to handle the responsibility. Like we're seriously not even allowed to question why someone wants a gun? Because I think the answer is invariably going to lie somewhere between "they think they might need to use it to shoot someone" and "they're planning to use it to shoot someone." Unless we're talking about cops or people in the military where guns are sort of part of the job and there's training and accountability (in theory...), these are randos who just love the idea of gun ownership.

Which is weird, because most of
us only have the two hands.

Here, I did some research and--huh? Ok, fine, I did a couple of lazy internet searches and the number of households in the country that have one or more guns has been more or less stable over the years (about 42-ish%), but the number of guns has only gone up. There were twenty million guns sold in 2020. Twenty million. I'm not like a statistician, but that sounds like it's not so much that there are more gun owners every year, just that people who do own guns just buy more guns. 

More guns. And the number of mass shootings has only increased, so how have more guns helped? Which brings me back to my original question: is there some number of guns at which Republicans suspect that mass shootings will decline? And if so, what is it? Because again, I'm not great with numbers, but it still seems like having fewer guns would do more to reduce the number people getting shot than having more guns.

It's similar to how zero unicorns results in the zero instances of
unicorn stampede and horn-related fatalities every year.