Columbine.

The media went absolutely batshit. Who were they? Why did they do it? Interview absolutely everyone! The public must know. And they tuned in in their droves to find out.

Incel types took note. If you’ve failed at life and want five minutes of fame, grab a gun and head back to school.

Australian here. We had one really bad mass shooting and then our government (who was also one of the most conservative governments in the last 50 years) banned guns. Haven’t had one since. Guns just aren’t a thing here and we kind of think you’re a weird country for being so obsessed with guns. I also personally think it’s weird that guns are like the symbol of your freedom, yet you don’t have universal healthcare. Universal healthcare offers so much more freedom than guns do.

In saying that a lot of countries have guns and don’t have the same problem with mass shootings. What the US has is a cultural problem in terms of your relationship with guns and violence. Unfortunately, doing a mass shooting is now a normalised way to deal with your problems. Not all of you, obviously. But enough of you that it’s gotten completely out of control. In Australia I don’t think it was just the banning of guns that has reduced mass shootings. We have a culture in Australia of ‘don’t be a dickhead’. I think when we had our mass shooting we all collectively just said yeah nah mass shootings are next level dickhead behaviour.

Meanwhile, before mass shootings, murder was a lot more common and society was more prone to violence.

Violence has been in a downwards spiral, regardless what is pushed to public forum.

We haven’t had AR15s for 200 years. The real answer though is more likely cultural, because there are plenty of countries with permissive gun laws who have much lower rates of gun homicide than the US.

The complete unwinding of social safety nets, mental health interventions, and educational funding from the Reagan years finally culminated in a completely vulnerable population. Then we began the era of 24 hour news, extremist Identity politics, and just a general erosion of any semblance of shared American identity.

That’s a nasty little stew.

I would blame this, and a lot of the problems “western” countries face, on the proliferation of 24 hour cable news networks since the Gulf War.

Reporting and tracking. Before the automatic weapons ban you had prolific bank robbers that shot their way out of many situations, but it wasn’t generalized to mass shootings.

Rico was created to combat organized crime in the 70s. Lots of people were killed, but it was presented as an organized crime problem not a mass shooting problem.

Since Columbine you have school shootings. One of the biggest predictors has become media reporting of a shooting. That’s obviously not the sole cause though.

Essentially the US has always been violent, it just hasn’t always been lumped into a single mass shootings bucket. Rival gangs fighting is totally different than a school shooter, and a murder suicide is also entirely different.

Semi-automatic guns became widespread in the US military in World War II. The US’s first mass shooting was in 1949, by a man who served in WWII.

I think at the high level it’s the military industrial senatorial complex, the deregulation and reagonomics under Republicans, the neoliberalism under democratic, globalization, de-industrialization, the modern banking/credit system, the modern media complex, and personalized engagement algorithms… Downstream of that is a high rate of poverty, debt, illiquidity, a poor healthcare system, reliance on jobs for affordable healthcare, a lack of access to robust mental health treatment, modernization of weaponry, a radicalized and angry society, collapsing social cohesion, division along small tribal lines, lacl of patriotism, and upregulation of the average amygdala. Downstream of that you have homelessness, addiction, mental health crisises, violence, suicide, murder, and the institutional inertia that makes these intergenerational problems.

Yes, we need a multifactorial approach to all of these things both acute and chronic. It isn’t as simple or as possible to get rid of the guns, but we can increase gun laws. We could require training of all citizens, we can give a budget to support red flag law enforcement, we can give the alcohol and tobacco regulation to the FDA, and let at the ATF focus on firearm enforcement, or roll it in to the secret service or fbim We can make healthcare free. We can spend a fuckton of money on it. We can raise the minimum wage. We can actually govern the economic policy rather than outsourcing it to the Fed, and focus on demand-side instead of supply -side economic solutions, pay for college, guarantee a living wage and housing.

But not with most of the Republicans in the way and the lobbyists at the ear of our representatives.

We need a modern Robespierre. A charismatic leader to lead the public by uniting them rather than dividing them, who will make such massive changes that they’ll come for his head.

how the hell are you going to shoot a big bunch of people with a musket?