Erich Pratt

The evil that caused a demented individual to open fire in a Texas church is incomprehensible to any sane mind.

But here’s an inconvenient truth for gun control fanatics: The killer already passed a background check at a gun store.

Not only that, he was denied a carry permit by the state of Texas. But did that stop him from carrying a handgun on Sunday? Absolutely not!

The fact is, gun control laws do not stop evil individuals from getting firearms ... or from carrying or using them ... or from utilizing trucks or any other item ... to commit heinous acts of violence!

There is nothing that gun grabbers are proposing today that would have made a bit of difference in Sunday’s shooting. And that includes instituting gun bans on certain types of firearms, as USA TODAY’s Editorial Board advocates.

OUR VIEW:Trump and politicians show how mental they are

OPPOSING VIEW:Trump’s right, this is a mental health issue

How will passing just “one more law” finally make the difference?

France has far more gun control than we do. They have greater restrictions on semiautomatic “assault weapons,” which are falsely labeled as such by newspapers like USA TODAY. Yet all the gun ownership restrictions in France did not stop terrorists from murdering 130 people at a concert in 2015.

The truth is that guns are used 16-100 times more often to protect life during crimes than to take lives, based on figures reported by the Obama administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2013.

And we saw in Texas, once again, where a sharpshooting plumber used his AR-15 rifle to gravely wound the gunman through a “shot in between his body armor,” according to the Daily Mail.

So, if there’s any message to be learned, it is to disabuse oneself of the notion that passing more gun control laws will somehow make Americans safe.

If there were an armed Good Samaritan inside the Sutherland Springs church — as there was at a Colorado Springs church 10 years ago — perhaps Sunday's news would only be reporting an “attempted” mass shooting.

Erich Pratt is the executive director of Gun Owners of America, a grassroots organization that represents more than 1.5 million gun owners.

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