Here We Go Again. Again.

Here it is: your weekly dose of mass murder. 

An armed man dressed in black opened fire late Wednesday night inside a crowded country and western dance hall in Thousand Oaks, Calif., killing at least 12 people, including a sheriff’s deputy who had responded to the scene. The gunman was also dead.

This story refutes every talking point gun nuts make about mass shootings.

Witnesses recalled a chaotic scene at the bar, which was filled with hundreds of people, many of them college students: A gunman opening fire, first at a security guard, as patrons dropped to the dance floor, hid under tables and broke windows to escape. 

The number of people wounded was unclear, but the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office said about 22 people had been taken to various hospitals.

The county sheriff, Geoff Dean, his voice cracking, identified one victim as Sgt. Ron Helus, who was shot when he entered the building.

And then there's this:

A witness interviewed by ABC7.com said that the violence started when the gunman walked up to the entrance to the bar, shot a security guard and a cashier, and deployed a smoke bomb.

Donald Trump and gun nuts keep telling us that more guys with guns will solve this problem. But the first ones to get shot were the bouncer and the cashier. Then the guy started throwing smoke bombs, making it almost impossible for anyone else who might have had a gun to shoot back. Because they would have no way to tell who was who in the cloud of smoke. Besides, carrying a gun while dancing is a terrible idea, as the FBI agent who accidentally shot someone on a dance floor could tell you.

But the assassin could fire blindly in any direction and hit more victims, shooting them like proverbial fish in a barrel.

Then a cop with a gun came in and was immediately killed.

Trump responded to the synagogue shooting by criticizing the victims for not having enough guards and guns, and saying that the shooter should be executed. This just shows how stupidly dense he is: there aren't enough security guards in the country to guard every synagogue, church, school, night club and dance hall. And the threat of execution is no deterrent to suicidal maniacs. In the end these killers shoot themselves, or commit suicide by cop.

And now we know who the shooter is:

Authorities identified the shooter as Ian David Long, 28, a Marine Corps veteran who was visited by the Ventura County sheriff’s crisis intervention team after a call of a “subject disturbing” at his home in Newbury Park in April. He was never placed on a mental health hold, and Sheriff Geoff Dean said Long may have been suffering from PTSD.

This country trained a man to be an efficient killer, sent him off to a war that messed with his head, and then turned him loose on society. Then he used the military tactics our country taught him to kill a dozen people and wound dozens more.

People will be eager to blame this man's mental state for the shooting. "See," they'll say, "he was crazy." Yes, he was. But the gun lobby put the weapons in his hands and pointed him at that dance hall.

Some may try to paint the Thousand Oaks victims as casualties of a war that has dragged on for 17 years with no resolution in sight. And they wouldn't be wrong if they painted the shooter as one of those victims. Despite a half-hearted surge last year, Trump has done nothing but lose ground in the war in Afghanistan.

But the real problem is, again, that we let any random person with a questionable psych profile have as many guns as they like through a perverse, willful and wanton misinterpretation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution so that gun manufacturers can keep raking in the dough and gun nuts can get their rocks off.