There seems to be a mad stampede to solve the problem of fully automatic weapons, but when's the last time such a weapon was used to kill a lot of people? Just doesn't seem to be a problem.
That's because they're terrible weapons for killing specific people. So are weapons with bump stocks. Both methods are ways to ruin any possible aim in favor of wasting a lot of ammo in any scenario where you want to shoot any specific people. Put them in the vicinity of a crowd where you don't care too much about who in particular gets it and they are in a can't miss situation.
In this case the people hiding and the like, unless they were behind armor, weren't doing themselves a bit of good. The man in the window surely wasn't aiming, but performing the much derided "spray and pray."
It's interesting that Europe, where firearms are much harder to obtain France and Britain have had their share of firearms related killing. Only the civilians were left defenseless. I'm sure that is why our perp here was spraying from a high window. Were he on the ground, someone would have been able to take some shots at him.
When it comes down to it, though, how do you protect people from a sufficiently motivated madman who doesn't care if he loses his own life? He could have tossed muriatic acid bombs, or hand grenades, driven an auto through the crowd (presently very popular in Europe).... If you want to kill people there is always a way to do it.
And does punishing the innocent really make sense? Restricting people's ability to maintain their swimming pools, or restricting the use of automobiles, or prohibiting the military from having weapons that could be used to kill people wouldn't help much. I suppose you could require all high rise buildings to have all windows bullet proof with no way to open them. That would be peachy in a fire situation, wouldn't it? And we always love to torture ourselves by being melodramatic "why has society fallen to the point where people do these terrible things." Society wasn't behind those guns, an aberrant man was behind them. How do you eliminate and prevent crazy people? I love the "well we can't fix it but shouldn't we do something" people. Sure, I think we should make puppies illegal. That would fix it. For that matter a sufficient quantity of cyanide would have killed everyone in a several block area and prevented these shootings. Makes as much sense as anything else proposed by the hand wringers.
Sufficiently motivated people who wish to kill others will always find a way, no matter how totalitarian our governments become to attempt to prevent such things. I think the answer may be to hold those people close to the killers, who were in a position to see the danger, but who chose to do nothing, as responsible as the killer for the carnage they did not prevent.
If people, instead of being afraid to say anything, were more afraid NOT to, that would fix everything, wouldn't it?
And making other people afraid makes people with power very happy.
It's a terrible tragedy, with no solutions that make any sense if we think about their bad effects. So let's just do something without thinking and be done with it.