I’m not surprised to read stories like this, in terms of how we learn about how the authorities knew well about the perpetrators of well known, abhorrent firearms related crimes before they went out and committed them.
In my locale back in about 1995, a domestic incident involving a man shooting two of his children to death was one episode the media played up in their support of then Justice Minister Allan Rock’s plan to register every duck and deer and gopher gun in the country in the promise of a safer society. As it turned out, the man had been known to the police and local Children’s Aid Society as far back as 1989 and that in one instance, because of his reported violent behaviour, he had had the gun confiscated from him and a firearms prohibition order imposed. However, he successfully petitioned (and this was done with apparently the full support of his wife) to have the gun returned to him and the prohibition order overturned. Yet I recall being yelled and sworn at during the family meal (when the incident was being discussed over the radio news) when I suggested that scarce tax money being spent on the futile idea of registering every gun in the country would be better spent on improving domestic intervention initiatives regardless of the weapons used.
Maybe I should have kept my younger mouth shut in that instance, but it really is surprising that these people will immediately pounce on law abiding firearms ownership when not long afterwards, we learn the real details of what happened and that those details generally contradict the positions and assumptions made by firearms prohibitionists.
It’s Intellectual Laziness.
I’m hearing the same from a few supposed “Intellectuals” at my kids’ mostly Conservative Private School.