Keith Thomas Kinnunen, the shooter who killed two people at the West Freeway Church of Christ in Texas on Sunday, was not allowed to own a gun. Under current law, it was 100 percent illegal for him to own or carry any firearm. He had a massive rap sheet dating back to 1998, including gun felonies. Yet he wasn’t locked up. That is why he was able to kill two people in the church. Thank God, Texas allows citizens to carry concealed weapons, so he was stopped before he could shoot and kill more. But the ugly fact is that most mass shooters are repeat offenders and known to law enforcement. If we actually had criminal control, almost all of these attacks would be prevented.

If the Left really wants to prevent most mass shootings, how about we bring back and reinforce mandatory minimum sentencing on gun felons? Throughout Americans cities, so many violent offenders have rap sheets full of gun violations, yet they are not seriously punished. How about we start “doing something” about mass shootings by punishing people like Keith Thomas Kinnunen and not deterring heroes like Jack Wilson who stopped the shooter before he could kill dozens of others?

A quick glance at Kinnunen’s criminal record shows at least a dozen arrests dating back to 1998. Here is what I was able to piece together from his arrest and court records in several states, as well as from some local news reports:

• May 4, 1998: Arrested in Tucson for carrying a firearm without a license. He was found guilty, but given no jail time.
• June 25, 1999: Arrested for misconduct involving weapons in Tucson. Charges dismissed.
• August 6, 1999: Arrested for theft and endangerment in Tucson. Found guilty on theft charge.
• August 18, 1999: Arrested for spilling load onto highway in Pima County, AZ. Found guilty.
• 2000: Convicted for driving without a license in Arizona.
• August 25, 2004: Arrested for disorderly conduct in Tucson. Charges dismissed.
• December 3, 2008: Arrested in Fort Worth, Texas, for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He was found guilty the next year but was sentenced to just 90 days.
• August 12, 2009: Arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Tucson.
• December 8, 2010: Charged with theft in Tucson and numerous failures to appear in court. Never served any new prison time.
• August 11, 2011: Charged with assault, disorderly conduct, and failure to appear in Tucson.
• November 29, 2011: Arrested in Grady County, Oklahoma, for domestic violence and felony aggravated assault. Plead guilty to misdemeanor assault and served 90 days with credit for time served.
• February 9, 2012: A warrant for his arrest was issued for arson in Grady, Oklahoma. He was eventually arrested for lighting tampons on fire and burning a cotton field. He paid a $4,500 fine.
• December 10, 2013: Arrested for theft in Fort Worth, Texas. Found guilty.
• March 25, 2014: Charged with assault knowingly causing injury in Tucson and illegally possessing a weapon.
• June 16, 2015: Arrested in River Oaks, Texas, for unpaid parking tickets.
• September 12, 2016: According to MyCentralJersey.com, he was arrested in Linden, New Jersey, for possession of a 12-gauge shotgun while he was taking pictures of an oil refinery. At the time, New Jersey police also found a contempt of court warrant stemming from an aggravated assault case in Oklahoma.

Notice that despite numerous charges and convictions for assault with a deadly weapon and felony possession of a weapon, this man barely served time and was out on the streets to commit this horrible attack on the church this week. This is what should be the subject of a national debate – why there are so many people with serious violent felonies and firearms violations who are not punished in a meaningful way, and what can be done about it.

Criminals like Kinnunen are the rule, not the exception, in the system. Even the most violent criminals barely serve time. Just last week, an Oregon man who pleaded guilty to raping three teens was sentenced to just 14 months in prison, and with early release programs, he will be out even earlier. It used to be that violent criminals were held before trial in jail, serving as a deterrent. But across the nation, we are seeing judges release the most egregious repeat violent offenders on low bail. Last week, a previously convicted rapist with weapons and robbery convictions was arrested for torturing and raping a 21-year-old woman in the Minneapolis area, a beacon of jailbreak policy. He was released on just $20,000 bail.

Why are politicians not speaking out about the epidemic of under-sentencing and parole violators rather than complaining about too much incarceration? As Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute observed last week at the New York Post, the most violent cities like Chicago and Baltimore are revolving doors for serious gun felons. “A third of Baltimore homicide suspects in 2017 committed their alleged offenses while on probation or parole, despite having an average of nearly 10 prior arrests. In Chicago, those arrested for shootings or homicides in 2015-16 had an average of 12 prior arrests.”

There was a multiple murder in New York over the weekend, but few in the country will ever find out about it. There will never be a public policy discussion over murders like this, because Republicans refuse to push the issue of repeat offenders avoiding jail time.

Rodriguez “Randy” Santos was arrested Saturday for beating five homeless men in Chinatown with a metal pipe while they were sleeping, leaving four dead and one critically injured. The 49-year-old victim who survived was the one who identified Santos for police. Santos was reportedly caught on video footage roaming the streets looking for more victims before he was caught.

Clearly, gun control wouldn’t have helped here, and already, nobody can carry a firearm to protect themselves against such attacks in New York City. But you know what could have worked? Criminal control of known repeat violent offenders who barely serve any time in prison.

In what is becoming an epidemic in cities like New York, Santos had at least 14 arrests, often for violent crimes, but was not locked up.

According to the New York Post, Santos had 14 prior arrests over 11 years, four just over the past year. Santos allegedly attacked a man by biting him in the chest last November, but the disposition of his case is sealed, and it’s unclear why he remained out of jail.

Also, that month, according to the Post, Santos was arrested for slugging a random stranger on the subway. His most recent arrest on May 13 was for striking a homeless person at a shelter with, you guessed it, a metal pipe.

Thanks to tough-on-crime policies put into place during the Reagan years, we’ve enjoyed nearly 21 consecutive years of reduced crime since the early 1990s. It was one of the greatest and only positive social trends in this country over the past generation, resulting in a 60 percent decline in violent crime. Now, thanks to a reversal of those policies, the crime wave is back. But instead of hanging this political vulnerability around the necks of Democrat politicians, Republicans are joining in the push to reduce incarceration even more and convincing Trump to go even further.

Last Tuesday, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), and it showed that “among U.S. residents age 12 or older, the number of violent-crime victims rose from 2.7 million in 2015 to 3.3 million in 2018, an increase of 604,000 victims.” This is significant because during every year between 1994 and 2015, the numbers in the NCVS declined.

We were beginning to think that the decline in violent crime would be a permanent trend. But the trend only persisted because bad guys were actually being locked up. That is no longer the case. The rate of violent crime is almost perfectly inverse to the rate of incarceration. Here is a chart of the murder rate from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting juxtaposed to the federal prison population.

The same can be said of the state prison population, which has declined dramatically in many states. The fact that the trend on violent crime reversing again is not setting off alarm bells reveals just how much the political priorities of the politicians have changed since last generation.

What was the culprit of the violent crime increase in this latest report? According to the NCVS press release, “This overall rise was driven by increases in the number of victims of rape or sexual assault (from 204,000 in 2015 to 347,000 in 2018), aggravated assault (from 561,000 to 694,000) and simple assault (from 1.7 million to 2.1 million).” Overall, the number of violent incidents increased from 5.2 million in 2017 to 6.0 million in 2018.

We have reported many cases here at CR of violent assaults and sexual assaults both by illegal aliens and citizens who accrue long rap sheets and barely serve any time, even for gun violence. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, of those criminals released from state prison in 2016, the median time served for assault, which includes aggravated assault, was 1.4 years, and the median time served for rape was 4.2 years. But that is just among those who actually serve time. So many others get off with probation, and the trend toward weakness is getting even stronger and faster.