In the aftermath of any mass shooting, the rhetoric builds up in intensity as gun control advocates continue to push for their favorite measures, none of which would ever really stop a mass shooting. The gun grabbers love to follow the adage, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” and this one isn’t any different.

Because of Parkland, we’re going to hear more and more and more about how much we need new gun laws to keep people safe. The thing is, there’s something far more lethal on the American streets.

More than 50,000 Americans died from drug overdoses last year, the highest figure ever. The tally has been pushed to new heights by soaring abuse of heroin and prescription painkillers, especially fentanyl. Heroin deaths rose 23 per cent in a year, to 12,989, slightly higher than the number of gun homicides, according to government data released yesterday. The total number of gun deaths – which included suicides and accidents – rose seven per cent to 36,252. It comes only days after another report which showed fentanyl, a synthetic opiate which is 40 times stronger than heroin, has become the largest drug threat to the United States, and causes 44 deaths every day.

I’m sorry, it sounds like drugs are the biggest threat out there, so what we need are tougher drug laws, right?

Except that heroin is already illegal, with a federal law enforcement agency existing solely to combat the drug trade in things like heroin. While fentanyl is “legal,” it’s tightly controlled. Purchase requires a prescription from a doctor and must go through a licensed pharmacy which strictly controls its inventory.

Yet somehow these drugs get on the street and are claiming lives left and right. People are dying, and they’re dying at an alarming rate.

People are far more likely to die from a drug overdose than they are from being shot.

But that doesn’t matter to some people. The statistics, the argument that there are people dying from something far more often than they do from a gunshot, are completely irrelevant to them. They simply don’t care.

They want to legislate by emotion. They want to crack down on guns because going after something like heroin and other drugs require something more than laws. Trying to ban guns is easy. Trying to combat anything else is complicated.

Meanwhile, the real solution to firearm-related violence is to combat the violence itself, not the tools used. Just as I’m not sure I’d ultimately care if it was the wholly illegal heroin that claimed a loved one’s life or the more legal fentanyl, I don’t really care about what the tool used to claim a loved one’s life is. I’d only care they’re gone.

And I’ve lost someone I cared about to violence perpetrated with a gun, so don’t tell me things would change after something like that. My perspective changed for about five minutes, then I settled down and remembered the gun wasn’t responsible for my dear friend’s death. It was the jackwagon who pulled the trigger.

Guns aren’t a threat. Violent people are a threat. Will the gun grabbers ever get that through their thick heads?