Nearly All Mass Shooters Since 1966 Have Had Things in Common
vice.com
vice.com
The access to firearms argument is not accurate. There are more and more guns now... More guns != more crime or death.
CA has very struict gun laws, but shootings still happen. Dont blame the object. How about lack of parenting, social media and the abundance of psychiatric drugs these kids are taking.
Mental illness is a problem.. No one wants to deal with it. Your mental if you want to kill children or mass amounts of people.
This writer did not do their research and seems rather uneducated about guns, their history and the laws.
Example, they mention the Assault rifles ban in 1994 during the Clinton Administration, but dont go into those details how IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE, then tries to push gun control points by saying: "gun manufacturers pounced on the opportunity to re-market military-style firearms to civilians."
A quick google search and I found this.
https://www.naturalnews.com/039752_mass_shootings_psychiatri...
https://www.ammoland.com/2013/04/every-mass-shooting-in-the-...
Now, how many are democrats would be an interesting read. None are NRA members.
It is just an unreasonable burden to expect articles about mass killings in America to completely ignore guns.
Maybe mass shootings follow the Swiss cheese model [0]. Several sets of circumstances align and you get a terrible outcome. Mental health, family, drugs, propaganda whatever. But guns are also a big hole in the cheese. It shouldn't be contraversial to point that out.
I want to know why these mental issues arise and how we might go about preventing them. I imagine there are more similarities between suicides and mass shootings than the media admits, yet the former gets mentioned with mental health while the latter focuses on access to guns.
We need to figure out how these mental health issues develop and find ways to solve them before they become a public problem. Maybe that means controlled, legal access to psychedelics, idk, but we need more than a copout of "gun control will solve everything". Maybe gun control is part of the solution, but it's certainly not the only part.
Also, whenever a mass shooting occurs, by definition the currently enacted laws failed to prevent it. The same can be said anytime there's murder, theft, rape, terrorism and so on.
Try to buy one. I double dare you. The only people who say this are those who haven't tried. Many reporters got egg on their faces when they tried making an expose' and failed. Others got in trouble because in their zeal to succeed, they were willing to lie on the required forms. Which could make them a felon...
If you want to get a (long) gun or guns quickly, yeah, I can see where that would be a hassle.
Now, an idea for AI application might be to analyze the environments the mass shootings occurred in to help create environments that minimize the casualty potential while retaining as mush aesthetics as possible. I could see a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) setup applying here, it's an interesting idea. Sadly, I do not have the bandwidth to tackle it.
According to the data they collected, P(person is female | person is a shooter) is just very low. Similarly, P( person is a college student AND person is of color | person is a shooter) > P(person is a college student AND person is not of color | person is a shooter).
Note that "white males" did not always appear. In one case race wasn't a distinguishing factor (workplace violence), in another color was a distinguishing factor (college violence), and in the rest, being white was a distinguishing factor.
This is pretty balanced overall. The data needs to speak for itself. It's okay to notice that in some cases, white males are more likely to commit mass shootings. As okay as noticing that in other cases, non-white males are more likely to commit mass shootings. This means that we can be zoom in better on the issues that lead to such crimes being committed, and get people the help they need, before they irreversibly hurt themselves and others.
They aren't talking about P(person is a shooter | person is a white male). That would be stereotyping, but also easily dismissed, because as you noted, P(person is a shooter | person is a white male) is also very low.
The problem of stereotyping is that people take a complex problem and attempts to reduce it by measuring people based on one or a few bits of information.
Crime is a bit like rain. The more one attempt to zoom closer to the atom the less we understand it and the poorer the prediction becomes. It get even worse when attempting to zoom in order to understand rare events.
If we look at the specific crime of rape in Sweden we see that P(person is Muslim | person is a rapist) > P(Person is a Christian | person is a rapist), by around 300%. The political reaction to people noticing the data is a bit volatile to say the least.
It is possible to still use the data, but its best to zoom out rather than in. A common one for crime is the acknowledgement that high risk groups tend share a trait of low social economic status. Thus a popular general prediction method is to measure social economic status when determining risk. What we then get is a more general P(person is socially isolated AND low income AND low education | person commit a crime) that we can compare to other prediction models. People then take each of those classifications and zooms out even further by addressing them independently and outside of crime prevention as improving them has value in itself.
For example, skin color may not be the determining factor in college violence, but social ostracism, so it would only become relevant in specific cases where that caused social tension. The larger problem, however, may be completely unrelated to skin color if most colleges don't have a problem with ostracising people with a particular skin color.
So yes, I completely agree that we need to take a step back and look at multiple explanations for the evidence we have and see if they explain future events.