Math and guns, what could be better?

I'm not a huge fan of guns. I've shot at targets and skeet and I'm perfectly comfortable going to the house of friends who I know to be responsible gun owners, but it's just not a particular interest of mine. I'd rather shoot baskets (sorry, that was cheap).

But some of the debate coming out of Washington is so batsh-t crazy that I had to pay attention. One of the witnesses was talking about the need to have high-capacity magazines because it'd come in handy for a woman alone with young children when multiple heavily armed intruders break in.

I just want to stop for a moment and ask, exactly how many times has that situation happened in the past year? The witness didn't cite any. Once? Twice? Ever?

So let's say it actually happened, maybe even twice in the past year. Is this something to base policy on? Are two instances in a year too many? For the specific people involved, I suppose so. For the country? It's too minuscule to even mention; two instances in a year, in 115 million households? How likely is that? Well, how often does something for which the percent likelihood is 1.73 millionths of one percent. occur? For you decimal fans, it's a probability of 0.0000000174.

I'll put it in academic terms. It means you would have about 10 times greater chance of taking the SAT 3 times, guessing on every question, and getting every single one right all 3 times. Does anyone make study decisions based on that?

So why this then? Clearly there's no logic involved. So emotionally then. Why exactly would this happen? Who would be doing such a thing? Criminals don't do stuff because they're looking to accomplish evil (Snidely Whiplash excepted. Even Bond villains want something). Criminals usually want money. So if they want to steal stuff, why multiple people and why be shooting? That decreases your possible take because you have to split it and it increases your chance of getting caught because it's attention-getting. It's too dumb, even for really stupid, really bad people.

So why did the US Senate spend time discussing this?