Do Better is an op-ed column by writer Lincoln Anthony Blades that debunks fallacies regarding the politics of race, culture, and society — because if we all knew better, we'd do better.

On the morning of Friday, May 11, a 14-year-old boy arrived at his former high school in Palmdale, California, just before first-period classes commenced, and began shooting a semiautomatic rifle, striking a 15-year-old boy in the arm. After firing off about 10 shots inside of Highland High School, the suspect called his father to explain what he had just done. His father contacted a family friend, an off-duty deputy, who apprehended the suspect at a nearby grocery store. This attack represents the 21st school shooting in which someone was either hurt or killed in the United States in the last 19 weeks.

Shortly after the shooting, rapid response teams recovered the SKS-style carbine used by the shooter, a rifle that can be legally purchased in the state of California by anyone over the age of 18 (as long as the gun doesn’t have any add-ons such as a detachable magazine or a grenade launcher). It’s not yet clear how the teen obtained the weapon, and authorities are still working to uncover a motive to make sense of the suspect's inclination and emotional disposition, but the shooting took place in a state with some of the harshest gun laws in America.

While the many voices of the gun reform movement reacted to the incident by extending their deepest sympathies — and also excoriating the nation's collective lack of urgency in enacting substantive policies — one of the responses from anti-gun-reform advocates was to denounce the effectiveness of gun laws because harsh gun laws imposed by the state where the shooting occurred failed to prevent the attack.

California's state laws are contrastingly tougher than federal standards. In California, there is a 10-day waiting period before a person can purchase a gun, while federal laws require no waiting period. In California, certain AR-15s are banned, while no federal ban on assault weapons currently exists. In California, there are limits on how many guns someone can purchase in a 30-day period, a requirement that concealed carriers obtain a permit, and a ban on the sale of large capacity magazines — the federal government does not currently have any of those measures in place. So after the shooting on May 11, anti-reform activists used this moment to decry these comparatively restrictive laws as ineffective, laying out their arguments as to why they shouldn't be applied nationwide. But the existence of gun violence in California is not a fact of the state’s policy flaws at all.