There’s a continual RRHHEEEE from the political Left these days on the epidemic of mass shootings that are, apparently, something that only happens here in the U.S. – except, that’s not true.  We’re not even the country with the most mass shootings.  Not by a (hah!) long shot.  Excerpt:

…But a study of global mass-shooting incidents from 2009 to 2015 by the Crime Prevention Research Center, headed by economist John Lott, shows the U.S. doesn’t lead the world in mass shootings. In fact, it doesn’t even make the top 10, when measured by death rate per million population from mass public shootings.

So who’s tops? Surprisingly, Norway is, with an outlier mass shooting death rate of 1.888 per million (high no doubt because of the rifle assault by political extremist Anders Brevik that claimed 77 lives in 2011). No. 2 is Serbia, at just 0.381, followed by France at 0.347, Macedonia at 0.337, and Albania at 0.206. Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, and Czech Republic all follow. Then comes the U.S., at No. 11, with a death rate of 0.089.

That’s not all. There were also 27% more casualties from 2009 to 2015 per mass shooting incident in the European Union than in the U.S.

“There were 16 cases where at least 15 people were killed,” the study said. “Out of those cases, four were in the United States, two in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.”

“But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany’s and five times the U.K.’s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher.”

Yes, the U.S. rate is still high, and nothing to be proud of. But it’s not the highest in the developed world. Not by a long shot.

Yet, some today propose banning rifles, in particular AR-15s, because they’ve been used in a number of mass killings. It’s important to note however that, according to FBI crime data cited this week by the Daily Caller, deaths by knives in the U.S. outnumber deaths by rifles by five to 1: In 2016, 1,604 people were killed by knives and other cutting instruments, while 374 were killed by rifles.

Now, to be fair, Norway’s stats are skewed (as the study notes) by one horrific event.  But hey, folks, the EU has us beat cold when it comes to mass shootings.  And they have the kind of gun laws that would give the worst gun-grabber in our Congress wet dreams.

So what can we conclude from this?  Simple:  Bad people do bad things.  Restricting or banning objects won’t stop them from doing bad things.  And when people do bad things, those people who have done the bad things are responsible; not any inanimate object that they chose to use as a tool.

It’s really not that complicated.