Stephen King tweeted about the mass shootings that killed at least 18 in his home state Wednesday, “THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN IN OTHER COUNTRIES.”

Except that it does. The multiple-victim public shooting that so recently took place at a concert in Israel, albeit an act of terrorists and not of a lone nutter, would seem a rather glaring refutation. Eight of the 10 worst mass shootings in recorded history, according to one account, occurred outside of the United States. King characteristically writes fiction here.

What does afflict Americans more than any other people, one guesses, is a tic that compels individuals, particularly celebrities, to respond to tragedy not with sympathy but by offering their strongly held political opinions as the panacea and depicting those holding different opinions as the responsible party. In a second tweet, King characterized officeholders upholding the Second Amendment as “apologists for murder.”

The establishments the murderer targeted both serve alcohol, which under Maine law severely restricts who can carry a firearm therein. The assailant allegedly complained of mysterious voices insulting him at both establishments, so possibly the absence of firearms did not factor into his thought process, if one can call it that. Counterintuitively, a lack of guns serves as a common denominator for sites of such gore, at least outside of a Stephen King novel. Schools and churches, for example, often play host to mass shooters. The places where one most expects to find guns, firing ranges and police stations, do not.

One who intends to violate laws against murder does not, as a rule, find dissuasion in the existence of gun prohibitions. In fact, the existence of such rules may draw killers to places that implement them. Anecdotal evidence points to places where such gun prohibitions, de facto or de jure, exist actually attracting shooters. Logic leads even gun-control opponents to grasp that the presence of gun carriers among a crowd of targets necessarily suppresses the body count accumulated by such mass murderers.

Just as King parochially omits horrific multiple-victim public shootings in the last decade in Kenya, New Zealand, and Pakistan from his only-in-America narrative, he imagines places that impose gun control as enjoying uniformly positive outcomes.

Maine, whose gun laws have come under scrutiny in the aftermath of the shootings, consistently ranks at or near the bottom in its low rates of volent crime and murder even as it ranks close to the top in terms of gun ownership by household. Some places that impose draconian anti-freedom measures with regard to firearms also register frighteningly high murder rates.

“The only gun shop in all of Mexico is behind a fortress-like wall on a heavily guarded military base,” the Los Angeles Times reported a few years back. “To enter the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales, customers must undergo months of background checks — six documents are required — and then be frisked by uniformed soldiers…. Each day the army gun store sells on average just 38 firearms to civilians.”

Does Stephen King, or anyone, argue that Mexico is safer than Maine?

Conceding the obvious that one feels safer in Maine, a place with few gun restrictions, than Mexico, a place with restrictions so severe that it limits gun sales to one store in Mexico City prohibited from advertising its wares or even its existence, raises the obvious, i.e., factors beyond gun control influence the prevalence of gun crimes. Stephen King’s analysis, in other words, is simplistic and based on a number of false assumptions.

More complex problems, involving the epidemic of evil and insanity, do not lend themselves so easily to solution by tweet.