Whatever the TSA did or did not do about pocket knives is immaterial to the discussion, as gun control has been on the table – and consistently opposed, weakened, and otherwise thwarted by the gun lobby – since at least 1934. Meanwhile effective gun control has gone ahead in every other civilized country on earth, generally over the course of at least the last half-century, so “hasty do-somethingism” is not at play here. And the results are plainly evident, reflected in the appalling statistics of gun violence in the US, not just mass shootings, where compared to any other economically advanced democracy on earth gun violence in America is a national epidemic. The prevalence of mass shootings is really just a side effect of the underlying epidemic.
So your idea of “rational risk assessment” seems incredibly misguided as it seems perfectly rational to address the issue of thousands of preventable deaths every year due to guns that other countries don’t experience, and at no real cost except the fictions conjured up by the gun lobby that nobody else in any other country seems to care about which, stripped of the distortions and exaggerations, amount to the inconvenience to gun owners of licensing, registration, and background checks – most of whom in those other countries fully recognize the critically important reasons for those measures.
One could bring forward an even stronger argument that a “rational risk assessment” of the risks of commercial air travel show the risk to be absolutely minimal, so why even worry about about a couple of African airlines that had crashes of the newest 737? Yet because this isn’t an incredibly politicized issue with undertones of religious zealotry, everything possible is being done to prevent it from ever happening again and costing even one life whose loss could have been prevented, and the prevention cost will likely total billions of dollars. And because it wasn’t an incredibly politicized issue with undertones of religious zealotry, the deaths of several children from sharp-pointed metal lawn darts caused the CPSC to ban them outright. Yet thousands of deaths every year from firearms – including the deaths of more children from firearms in the US than in a dozen comparable industrialized countries combined – are perfectly A-OK, and opposition to such is apparently “irrational” – because, hey, most kids in gun-owner households don’t die, so why worry! :rolleyes: