The gun prohibitionists have found a new way to 'slice the onion'. Age restrictions on gun purchases.
It's a gimmick that sounds like it makes sense. We have age restrictions on all sorts of products. Why not guns? Aren't they deadlier than beers? Didn't we just have a lethal school shooting by a 19-year-old?
Except that one is a civil right and the other isn't.
Also most mass shootings aren't carried out by teenagers. Most school shootings are. But that's because the people most likely to target schools are current or former students who are probably under 21. If you raised the age restriction to 30, you could cover a lot of mass shooters, including Omar Mateen, the Muslim terrorist who shot 49 people at the Pulse nightclub, but not Stephen Paddock in Vegas.
Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech immigrant shooter, who racked up one the worst campus killing sprees with 32 murders, was 23. He wouldn't have been covered by conventional age restrictions.
Elliot Rodger, who killed 6 people in the University of California, Santa Barbara shootings, was 22.
Should we be raising the age restrictions to 22 or 23? Or 57?
There haven't been very many school shootings. And teens are quite adept at getting past age restrictions.
Adam Lanza's mother bought his guns. Age restrictions wouldn't have stopped him. Dylann Roof bought his gun eight days after his 21st birthday. The age restrictions wouldn't have stopped him.
The Columbine shooters bought their guns second-hand from other people. Age restrictions would not have stopped them.
But prohibitionists keep coming up with new gimmicks to triangulate their way past the Bill of Rights. These gimmicks don't make a real difference, but they 'slice the onion' on the 2nd Amendment.