Mass shootings motivated by religious extremism. Mass shootings motivated by mental illness.
Mass shootings motivated by racial hatred or bigotry. Mass shootings motivated by plain old anger.
If only--if only--there was some common thread among all these different mass shootings that we could address and have a discussion about. Something that--no matter the motive--we could all look at and examine and see if there's anything we could do that might lower the risk of future mass shootings. Something that every single mass shooting has.
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Oh well, I guess there's no common thread after all. Let's continue to only talk about religious extremism and nothing else when the mass shooting was motivated by religious extremism, or only talk about mental illness and nothing else when the shooter was mentally ill.
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And yet the people are still dead. So we have to ask ourselves what we really want. Do we want fewer dead people or fewer people dead because of a specific tool? Call me nuts but I'm on board with the dead part being the most important.
Now how do people get involuntarily dead the most? Guns it certainly is. Cheap handguns mostly not ugly black rifles that is, and a tiny tiny fraction in mass events. But a more salient question is why do they get dead the most? Gun ownership alone doesn't correlate very well with homicide rates internationally. Neither do restrictive gun laws. Would a massive, 2A busting gun control shift as in Australia reduce the homicide rate in the US? Almost certainly, but almost certainly not by very much. Just look at recent articles from RWNJ bugaboo Chicago, where 80% or so of both offenders and victims in homicides belong to the same 0.05% of the population. Would any reduction in gun availability reach this subgroup, when any machinist can knock one out of common steels in a few hours? Even if you found the guns they have, the US is awash with gunsmiths, before we even think of 3D printers. Why does this subgroup, duplicated across most of the nation (wherever data have been collected, the vast majority of shooting victims AND perpetrators are established criminals. Note please what the word majority means, and the difference from "all"
Because they live a hopeless, desperate existence where poverty and lack of opportunity make the quick buck and possible quick death of crime an acceptable choice. Why is that? Now, in true Japanese TMS fashion, we get to the root cause. Because the US, like, not coincidentally, most of the industrialized nations with very high homicide rates regardless of gun proliferation or legality, we have a terrible social safety net, a massively unequal distribution of wealth and investment, education and healthcare. We have a large underclass of hopeless young men lured into violence and crime because they have no other option.
Solving that would get us approaching the homicide rates of more enlightened nations, even heavily and easily armed enlightened nations. Would it stop things like this weekend? Nope, but there are far more than 50 people killed every year. Magically getting rid of all guns? Even were it possible it wouldn't stop the root cause of most killings, or indeed any. The latest loon chose guns, because they are indeed easy and accessible. Gonzalez chose fire and killed many more. Kehoe chose dynamite and killed still more. McVeigh fertilizer bombs, Bin Laden planes. There will always be loons driven to kill because of some twisted ideology or other. They are a tiny minority of killings despite the publicity though. Guns don't cause any of those loons or drive any of those ideologies. They make it easier, and we should do what we can to redress that, but to expect it to make a huge dint in homicide rates is just Panglossean nonsense. Most people kill because they are desperate enough to choose a violent, murderous lifestyle. We need to fix that first. A much smaller number kill because they are pure and simple nuts. We can't fix that by making them choose another weapon.
