You know why they didn’t happen? Because while there were handguns and hunting rifles back then, high-capacity semi-autos like AK-47s and AR-15s were pretty much unknown in civilian life.
Shootings could and did happen, but mass shootings almost never happened because of the great difficulty in committing one. Take the University of Texas tower shooting back in 1966. The shooter had been a Marine sharpshooter, and he was picking people off from a vantage point 230 feet above the ground. Over the course of 90 minutes, he killed 14 people.
How long did it take the Newtown shooter to mow down 20 kids and 6 adults 46 years later? It was less than five minutes between the time he used his Bushmaster to blow out a window next to the school’s locked entrance, and the time he killed himself. And he hardly needed any special skillz to slaughter a couple dozen people in just a few minutes.
There’s what’s rotten with the culture: that we allow the presence of weapons in civilian life whose only use is to kill a shitload of people in a hurry. It’s a moral sickness, and it’s overwhelmingly a Republican sickness.