On Wednesday night, the nation endured yet another horrific mass murder, this one perpetrated by a mentally ill Marine veteran with a pistol in Thousand Oaks, California. He killed 12 innocent people at a bar, including a responding sheriff’s sergeant, before taking his own life.

We opted to let the story develop yesterday before comment, but today we find we must once again set the record straight against those who would use the deaths of innocents for political gain.

The Associated Press reports, “[He] joined the Marines at 18 and was married as a 19-year-old in Honolulu in June 2009, according to military and court records. His military service lasted nearly five years, and he was honorably discharged with the rank of corporal in 2013, the Pentagon said. He was part of the infantry, responsible for hauling and shooting machine guns.” He also was deployed to Afghanistan for seven months in 2011, which is when his marriage fell apart.

Unfortunately, he likely suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, if not other things. Yet the assailant somehow passed a mental health assessment — or at least the specialist brought in by authorities to evaluate him after he caused a domestic disturbance concluded he could not be involuntarily committed for treatment. And he was still able to legally purchase a firearm.

As for that firearm, the mainstream media is up to its usual misinformation campaign. According to Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean, the assailant used a .45 caliber Glock 21 with “an extended magazine.” We still don’t know how many rounds that magazine could hold, but California law limits capacity to 10 rounds. We also know that mass murders at Columbine and Virginia Tech happened despite the killers using mostly 10-round magazines.

Media reports often refer to standard-capacity magazines as “high capacity,” however, and other reports claimed it was a “high-powered” handgun, just like they do any time an AR-15 is used. Leftists routinely use deliberate but meaningless hyperbole to make these massacres even scarier for people who don’t know anything about guns, and then they push emotionally driven bans on certain demonized firearms based on dishonest rhetoric.

The fact that this shooting occurred in California, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, didn’t stop California (and other) Democrats from making a soap box out of caskets. Likely incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said gun control “will be a priority for us going into the next Congress,” because more such laws, she claims, “will save many lives.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein insisted, “Some will say California’s strong gun laws didn’t prevent this shooting, but without stronger federal gun regulations, there’s little California can do to keep guns coming in from other states.” She then proceeded to list the Democrat grab bag of gun-control fantasies, none of which would have done a thing to stop the massacre in Thousand Oaks.

Finally, as we often point out, there are more than 40 murders in this nation every day, most of which happen on Democrat-run urban poverty plantations. Roughy a third of those murders are committed without a firearm at all.