Outrage and Statistics into Policy

This is not wrong, but it's a broken model of how information and policy is propagated and debated.  One immediate concern is that you use the word "we" when discussing groups that don't contain me (nor you, I suspect).

a tragedy catches our attention, we point to statistics to show it's an example of a distressingly common problem, and we propose laws to address the issue.

Not true.  The tragedy catches some people's attention, and they pick statistics that will gain them further attention and funding.  That amplification catches more people's attention, but on slightly different topics than are justified.  Still other people have ideas about what laws they'd like to see, and use this attention to justify their ideas and prevent rational discussion of it.

There is no "we" on such topics.  Bootleggers and Baptists only.

I have wanted to write a similar post. I actually think that the two main clusters of school shootings are so different that they shouldn't even be considered the same thing. On the one hand we have shootings which have a small number of victims, usually involve handguns, and tend to be related in some way to urban gang violence; on the other hand we have the shootings with a large number of victims or intended victims, often involve assault rifles of some kind, and tend to be related to socially isolated individuals who justify their actions as some kind of revenge. (And your post made me more aware of a third category, which is acts of violence which by happenstance take place near a school, which really shouldn't count as the same thing.)

The former group makes up the vast majority of cases recorded as "school shootings" but gets essentially zero national press; the latter group is extremely rare relative to the former, but gets infinite coverage. But there is almost no overlap between the causes, means, and motives between the two groups, and things which will help one will do almost nothing for the other.

I feel like the argumentation here is kinda misleading.

Here's a pattern that doesn't work very well: a tragedy catches our attention, we point to statistics to show it's an example of a distressingly common problem, and we propose laws to address the issue.

The post promises to discuss a pattern. It's obviously a culture-war-relevant pattern, and I can see a pretty good case for it being one where all the examples are going to be at least culture-war-adjacent. It's an important pattern, if true, so far that seems justified and worth worrying about how to improve on.

But then the post provides one example. Is it a pattern? If so, what are the other cases, and why doesn't the post concern itself with them? If the post is about the pattern of mistakes and how to address them, and why this is a thing to worry about in general, shouldn't there be more like 3+ examples?

The case made that gun violence is not being addressed well, and is conflating at least two different but related problems, seems quite strong. It's a good read, and the statistics presented make a strong case that we're not addressing it well. I liked the argument presented, and felt better informed for having read the post (note to self: I should probably dig a bit deeper on the statistics, since the conclusion is one I'm pretty sympathetic to). But if that's the argument the post is going to make, why isn't the title / intro paragraph something more like "we're not addressing the main causes of gun violence" or "mass shootings that make headlines aren't central examples of the problem" or something like that?

I assume that the gun violence example is one case of many, and that there are both general and specific lessons to be learned. I assume it would be possible to over-generalize from one example, so looking for common features and common failures would be instructive.

Overall, it felt like the post made several good points, but that the structure was a bit of a bait and switch.

ten incidents in which four people die isn’t better than one in which forty die

Worth being explicit that the mass shooting incidents you spoke about above are ones where four or more people are shot. The number of deaths in a mass shooting incident can be zero.

This doesn't contradict anything you said, but I think it would be easy for someone to get the wrong impression.

Translating this into policies, the efforts to re-ban assault rifles don’t make sense: gun homicides are overwhelmingly from handguns. Same with red flag laws, where a judge can order someone’s guns confiscated, since most of the homicides are via illegally possessed guns which could already be confiscated

So what's the rational thing to do?

a) Advocate the policies that would make the most difference, regardless of political feasibility.

b) Support some sort of compromise between what makes a difference, and what could get passed.

You are not yourself using a) style logic, because if you were you would call for handguns and assault rifles (and...) to be banned. That's the policy with the most impact, because the impact of an assault rifle ban isn't zero.

But consider the possibility that your opponents are applying (b) style logic themselves. Maybe they would like to ban handguns or all guns, but don't feel that they have a hope of passing the legislation.

If the only changes you can make politically are small changes ... why not make them, and get small benefits? There's a name for the opposite: "sacrificing the good to the perfect".