Federal agents on Wednesday morning hauled more than 120 firearms, including “machine guns,” out of the Ahwatukee Foothills home of a man suspected of shooting at a campaign office for the Democratic Party three times and posting bags of white powder labeled as poison near political signs.
Jeffrey Michael Kelly, 60, was arrested on Tuesday night near his Ahwatukee Foothills home by Tempe police who, according to court documents, used surveillance footage to find the suspect.
Sure, we should have the data, because more data is usually useful, but I’m not certain that it’s actually material.
Let’s say that, statistically, the people that owned >20 firearms were 100% more likely to commit a violent crime with a firearm than the general population. First, that’s still a very, very low percentage of people that own >20 firearms, second, any way you cut that, gun ownership is still a civil liberty in the US, and third, you’re still looking at correlation rather than causation, and I don’t know if a correlation–and remember, this is just a mental exercise, rather than any real statistics–gets you any closer to finding the real cause.
This is the same problem that you run into when you start talking about factors that make someone into a person that commits a mass casualty event; you can find a lot of factors, but simply having one or more of those factors doesn’t mean that you will commit a mass-casualty event, and not having any of those factors also doesn’t mean you won’t commit a mass casualty event.
