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Comment by onesafari | Hacker News Reader

The root cause may be bullying and ostracization combined with the media contagion effect. This is a repeating pattern.

Bullying: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texa...

The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said

In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said. Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school.

“He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people”. Ramos’s cousin Mia said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together. He’d brush it off in the moment, Mia said, then complain later to his grandmother that he didn’t want to go back to school.

Contagion: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-shootings-ar...

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There's an amazing amount of "anti-bullying" education that goes on. I've got 4 kids and they all got many hours of anti-bullying.

The issue there is that the solution is (at least in Denver Public Schools) that the burden is put squarely on the students. The message is that only students can prevent bullying. My experience is that teachers and administrators absolutely will not intervene. One of those 4 kids was getting picked on/bullied, sometimes directly in front of a teacher. Who did nothing. The only times I got any help from schools was when an actual, observable injury, like broken skin, appeared. Other than that, my bullied kid just experienced "restorative justice" where the bully refused to show up, and therefore nothing changed.

I was mercilessly bullied in 2nd and 3rd grade. My tormentors would tease me, ambush me and manipulate things to get me in trouble. I wasn’t perfect, but I wasn’t violent.

I dreaded going to lunch, then school in general. At one point I didn’t want to leave my house.

You know what stopped it? Mr. Alexander, a NYC schools science teacher who let me eat lunch in his room, saved me the Tuesday Science NY Times section and gave me science teacher manuals with experiments to do. He was a wounded Korean War vet, I believe a master sergeant who presented a very stern appearance. I’d do random errands and do science stuff and eventually helped with a few things in class. He took the time as an adult to help me understand that I was something, was a mentor and worthy of friends. Looking back, he changed the course of my life. One of the only regrets that I have in life is the I was never able to find him and thank him, as he’s almost certainly passed by now.

Every kid needs a Mr. Alexander. Someone who gives a shit and takes a moment to do something. It makes me angry that these shooters are often kids struggling with emotional problems, and instead finding someone to help, end up on online forums grooming them to be bigots or monsters.

I studied to be a teacher. Every teacher knows that the kids we help will usually not reach out to us once they're adults, and that's a part of the job we're fine with.

Mr. Alexander knew he changed your life, and expected nothing in return. Teaching was his reward.

When I got bullied in junior high I immediately went to the vice principal. That was my understanding of what you were supposed to do. And she set up a meeting with me and the bully, and the bullying stopped after that. (Though I remember when I walked into the office the bully looked at me and realized what the meeting was about and he said, “oh give me a break.” He has definitely expected us to settle it ourselves.)

Yeah. You can teach kids that bullying is bad, but if there’s nobody to actually enforce anything and show that there are consequences for bullying, kids quickly learn that there’s really no reason not to mess with people. Bullying is often an easy way for kids to be funny and move up the social ladder, if just a little bit. Unfortunately, the “meme” that teachers only step in when the victim fights back is very true. I’ve witnessed it myself (thankfully I wasn’t a victim) and everyone I know did as well. Bullying victims are punished by every level of society—it’s not hard to imagine that some of them lash out and want revenge.

That’s not to justify shootings at all. But people who suffer years of abuse, especially during childhood, can’t imagine a better life because they’ve never experienced one. An irrational act of terrorism to us is a rational act of balancing the scales to them.

Yup this is a lot of the problem, we stopped being able to discipline kids and they can be really nasty when left unchecked.

Denver Public Schools will discipline kids, just not for bullying. Apparently the victims are supposed to deal with it, which I think is logically inconsistent. If the victim could deal with it, they would. Victim is still getting bullied, therefore they can't do it.

I guess we've lost our sense of individual justice. Standing up for ourselves, making what's right on our mind even if it means consequences.

My personal experience was that some teachers (Kirksville Jr High "Coach" Keith Jerome was one) actually let some bullying go on. Coach Jerome let some kids beat other kids that he didn't like. That would have been around 1974, so maybe in your Golden Age of individual justice and standing up for ourselves.

In general, I think that teachers do use bullies to extract revenge on students they wouldn't otherwise be able to punish. Same as we as a society let cops do extra-judicial killings and such.

I think you have a great point, yet something that I haven't seen anyone talk about is scale. The scale of the schools in the United States is enormous. I hear about 2000,3000, 5000-student schools.

Some family's studied in the U.S., and even their middle school and elementary is 2000 students ! That's enormous, gigantic!

Here in Mexico schools are small-scale. Education here is much, much smaller scale. I think that the bigger the student population is at the campus, the bigger the chances are of failing at important problems such as bullying, since extreme standardization of these processes creates more problems than genuine solutions. Plus.

As someone who studied high school in Mexico and the US and saw students get bullied in both, cultural issues at play make all the difference. Even the most vicious bullies had a sense of "oh crap, we've gone too far" in my Mexican high school. I saw the students defend the bullied kid at both schools, but in Mexico, both bullies and the rest of the students showed some compassion towards the bullied. And the bullied got to play soccer with the other students during recess. The bullied were never wholly ostracised. In contrast, when the other students defended the bullied in the US school, there was this feeling of "you should fend for yourself; nobody is going to help you. You're on your own." It's hard to explain, but that's what I felt being a spectator.

All this is just my n=1 experience, and I could be misreading things, but I'm convinced there's a cultural element that can explain the helplessness of bullied kids in the US school system.

I feel you are on to something. I think that on top of those other things, the last straw is that the U.S. society is much less integrated. My neighbors have said 3 words to me the last 10 years I lived here (moved from Europe). Where I come from the whole town would know the troubled kid, would either step in before the bullying got really bad, or sure as heck would not let the kid buy a machine gun.

Maybe the problem with the US is that the society is just too free. Or not enough churchgoing.

Are there no Bullies in say, the United Kingdom?

The big difference between UK and USA is the number of guns we have in our country compared to theirs. We probably can't stop bullying, but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.

I was bullied and still am. I have used and owned guns since I was 4. I haven't once thought about killing another person, and I too suffered from a speech impediment and didn't have it easy in school. The difference between me and these mass shooters is that I was told to use that as strengths and to use it to make myself better. I have and successfully done so. The mass shooters as of late feel like this is the only way to settle their rage and anger. It's rather sad.

The issue isn't guns the issue is the crumbling family and tge degradation of society. We humans are nothing but animals down to the core. If a person wants to kill they will find a way.

Another issue in the USA is the lacking mental Healthcare that other nations have. Many are afraid to seek mental health help because of the stigma of looking weak, much like men not reporting rape or sexual assault that they experience. Also couple that with covid19 lockdowns and that gives these at risk people lots of time to think, plan, and execute. At this time its far to late for them. As a result you get more mass shootings.

It doesn’t follow that just because _you_ have never thought to use guns, that nobody else will think to use guns and therefore guns are not the problem. Even if 0.01% of bullied people think to use guns that’s still many shootings. There will be disturbed people in any society, the question is how to limit the damage they cause.

In the UK we had one school shooting (conducted by an adult), and after that very strict restrictions were put on gun ownership. A similar case happened in Australia.

The fact that it is still controversial whether “guns are the issue” shows that the US has not yet begun to grapple with the issue.

Thanks for sharing that, sorry to hear the situation but really interesting thoughts.

In your opinion what lead to the crumbling of the institution of family, that did not happen in other countries?

Not parent, but my thoughts:

- Decline of religion/spirituality is more pronounced in usa.

- More dual working parent homes (due to free labor markets). I also suspect that while real incomes have risen, actual disposable income has decreased, which pressures households into dual working arrangements. This means less time invested by parents in kids.

- institutional rot of public education . As some poster said, school bureaucracy is now defacto enabler of bullying - by doing nothing when observed... and punishing teachers that actually try.

- the internet has cracked the authority of social groups, with more time spent online and people more fractured among niche interests. This means less oversight and more activities happening without a concerted response by the group

The US is intensely religious compared to much of Europe. Intensely.

Yes but you should compare vs peers.

You want to look at countries with high per capita ownership of firearms.

With the exception of uruguay, most comparable countries [1] place higher importance on religion vs USA [2]

That veing said, there are confounding factors. These surveys are not measuring spirituality, for example.

Then there is the elephant in the room with regards to gdp per capita. I've been told of an old chinese proverb that illustrates this point:

No food. One problem. Much food. Many problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations#...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

I think you are gonna need to specify what countries you think are worth comparing, because there's not really a structured correlation between the lists you link (and among large countries, the US has relatively high religiosity and relatively low atheism, look above and below at your [1]).

> - Decline of religion/spirituality is more pronounced in usa.

vs where?

You haven't even spent 15 seconds looking up basic facts about religion, have you?

It shows.

Are drugs a serious factor in the US? In the case of this shooter, his mother was struggling with drugs, had a fraught relationship with the son and the grandmother was pushing them out. Growing up amongst that would build a lot of anger in someone.

Good call out on the mental healthcare I think this often gets overlooked, but you have to wonder if it was available in this instance would we be here today

> I haven't once thought about killing another person…

You haven’t _THOUGHT _ of killing another person? Ever? It must be amazing to live with such purity of thought.

> The issue isn't guns the issue is the crumbling family and tge degradation of society.

The United States is unique when it comes to crumbling family?

I don't think it is rare to have never imagined killing someone. Not trying to be judgy.

I think the wording is kind of silly. Bragging about never even having a thought is a weird way to claim virtue.

If you read this bit of text:

“Imagine killing another human”

What happens in your head? Is it blank save for a triumphant “Not today, Satan!”?

If I were to write “Imagine pushing somebody off a cliff”, it would be common for people to just… not imagine that? And this refusal of imagination is a virtue that, if it were more common, would somehow be helpful to society?

I grew up in the UK, before I moved to the US. In the UK, I was taught that a solid punch was the solution to bullying. I fear the issue in the US is just a very disturbing take on a solid punch. You're relentlessly taught through film and media that a good guy with a gun, probably crawling through an air duct, is that solid punch. I was taught to just hit them. In the face. On the nose. Even if you lose, just hit them.

I fear this message has lost something in translation.

Yep, standing up on your own is one of the core American values I believe has been lost to the American Education System. Although I have not been to an American high school or Middle School, the school at which I was definitely had western values and taught that violence was and will never be the option. That you oughtta let the _system_ solve it. But the system has a ton of bureaucracy. I think that we let so many things go by because taking justice into your own hands is bad.

Anyways, I digress. But here are some of my thoughts: I just got from a three-day trip to Monterrey, a city in Mexico. This is where my mom and dad went to college. Yet there is this vibe, always, either inside or outside the school that just feels like _everyone_ is always hustling. Making their lives work. Going to big measures to achieve their dreams, whether legal or not. I met a wealthy guy, interesting acquaintance. We talked about life. One of the main things he said to me was that - emphasizing that although it's cliché it's just too true - "the universe is yours. take it."

And this just rings too true for me, I think that our education has decoupled from American values. Or maybe those values were already broken to begin with. My point is, bureaucracy has led us to do unimaginable things and not see "action -> result." Yet we were raised by our parents telling us that dreams will come true with hard work and effort. We are all socially forced to follow the rules, not skipping lines, etc. But it feels more and more like those lines are crossed everyday and goals are more important.

Do you realize you're arguing that people need to stand up on their own in a thread about a mass shooting of children? In the twisted viewpoint of the killer, he stood up for himself, by attacking others. Instead, he should have let the system help him.

I think the way to interpret that comment is that if the killer had simply gotten into a fist fight after class, like many of us here (including me) did to resolve disputes, things probably would've gone differently.

I was viciously bullied from 3rd grade through 6th and eventually stopped it through physical violence. The guy who bullied me (we exchanged black eyes on multiple occasions) ended up being one of my best childhood friends and I attended his father's funeral last year after he was killed in a tragic accident. Fighting amongst boys is normal.

Read the parent of my comment. I was addressing bullying.

But yeah, it's true. One could argue that the school shooter was doing this for himself, which of course isn't something I'd wish on anyone. I think that these teenagers feel helpless, without any purpose in life. I'm not saying it's the worst time to be alive, but the mass appeal of no-religion, being agnostic is a real problem. I even doubt if I should continue being agnostic at times. Every once in a while I lose purpose and really haven't found a good way to cope with it.

Generally speaking, I think the cause of these shootings comes down to the feeling of helplessness and not feeling useful to society.

A lot of children (boys especially) in America aren't taught that rough play is OK, anymore. Wrestling and rough housing, as I did when I was a kid (GenXer) is actively frowned upon and stopped, I've noticed, more often than not. I have a 7 year old and I'm amazed at how many of his friends are shocked when they see my son and his cousin wrestling about and race to tell me they're "fighting". I feel bad laughing when I have to explain to them that they're just wrestling around (his cousin is a girl and man, I hope her high school gets a girl's wrestling division - her take dows are awesome). I think American kids are so unfamiliar with physical combat that, for a lot of them, their first step to fighting back is to reach for a gun because that's all they've been shown on TV. Physical combat sport in any form is just so foreign to them, using a gun is much more intuitive.

Hah, love it!

My daughter is younger and smaller than my son, but in any "fun sibling violence" situation she just doesn't stop hassling until she thinks she's "won" or us parents have to intervene. They never really come close to even danger of the spilling-blood-kind of physicality, but my daughter constantly surprises me with what punishment she's willing to risk just to try and "get the last one in". She's tougher than him.

The "gun as solution" psychology is definitely a large part of the problem.

With zero tolerance policies a punch will get you a two week suspension on your "permanent" school record while the bully will get a day or nothing.

Yeah, but (pardon my French) who the fuck cares? Straight-A valedictorian reporting in. I’d’ve advised middle school me that this (a punch to the nose) couldn’t be a worse resolution.

With crap middle school administration, the bullied are ending up in detention (or worse) while the provocateurs are getting away without repercussion.

I agree. Yet part of the problem is that your future kinda depends on it. You could be cataloged as having 'mental issues' for punching a guy in the face, even if it was for self defense. But yeah, I guess your point still stands since we've lost our sense of what's right and standing up for ourselves. The "Fine, I'll do it myself" meme would definitely apply here.

My middle school grades and teacher recommendations got me into an elite high school. If I had thrown punches at bullies, got suspended, missed test, etc.. I wouldn't have had that opportunity. Most people's middle school grades are probably useless but I dunno maybe they get them into a higher track in 9th grade like AP courses and stuff vs remedial work.

>Yeah, but (pardon my French) who the fuck cares?

Well, the people suffering from it who haven't figured out that it doesn't matter. And the school certainly won't tell you that because of moral hazard; suffering ensues.

>With crap middle school administration, the bullied are ending up in detention (or worse) while the provocateurs are getting away without repercussion.

Working as intended.

> we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country

Can we? AnimalMuppet already mentioned the legal barriers, but there's another issue: the US is currently suffering from extreme political polarization which has already led to an insurrection. How do you think that would interact with an attempt at mass confiscation[0] of guns?

I fear such a policy any time in the near future would spark a civil war, leading to many times more deaths than all the school shootings added together.

[0] I read your post as implying mass confiscation. Simply restricting the purchase of new guns would take many decades to significantly reduce the number of guns in circulation.

Restrictions and buybacks seem pretty reasonable to me. Supposedly support for the former is very high, and the latter is voluntary. I'm surprised training requirements aren't commonplace because there'd be a commercial interest from gun ranges and the like to lobby for that.

I'm sure there'd be pushback, but restrictions on gun advertising might be another option. Other countries have regulations around advertising pharmaceuticals, fast food, tobacco, gambling and so on.

The support for restrictions, as far as I can tell from polls, is mostly about expanding background checks. Even after a recent shooting support for additional gun control law beyond expanded background checks seems to be in decline (see article below).

Interestingly among those polled from the Democratic party, which is broadly considered the entirely pro-gun-control party, only 54% felt that gun control laws were the most effective way to prevent mass shootings. (31% of Independents and 17% of Republicans responded similarly.) The rest seem to mostly fall into the camps of either 'more effective policing' or 'preventing the spread of extremist ideologies.'

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/05/25/most-vo...

The insurrection was because of perceived voting fortification due to mail in ballots. Citizens fighting for the integrity of the democratic voting process still means they believe that US democracy is real. Wouldn't it be worse had they just resigned to thinking voting is fake, like most people under communism did. And never challanged obviously fake results.

> Can we?

We can't solve this problem because we're all talking about highly theoretical and utopian solutions that don't account for actually existing realities.

The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".

The US constitution says "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Yes, there's a preface about a well regulated militia, and yes, people were using muskets when it was written, but the Supreme Court has ruled that this confers an individual right to possess modern firearms.

And the Supreme Court is even more right-wing now, and likely to force blue states to loosen their gun laws to look more like red states.

So maybe we'd have a more productive conversation if we talked about what's possible in the actually existing United States instead of dreaming about Australia's successes, because there's zero probability that we'll be able to learn from Australia.

Australia isn’t really a success at solving the underlying social issues. Except for managing to take away the guns. Which I personally believe was a massive overreaction to an event that provided convenient political capital that politicians wanted to spend so they were seen to be doing something about the tragedy. We also implemented insane gun control laws involving such bull shit as regulating gun shaped toys based on how scary they look… it’s absurd.

I doubt that even with our previous level of gun ownership we would have had the same outcome either. We have a social healthcare system that at least provides some level of mental health support and our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power. While this may have eventually changed with greater cultural homogenisation to American content via the internet, I’m unconvinced that it would have ever been the same as we see in America today.

The school shooting problem is very very American and i suspect it has a lot to do with cultural contagion brought on by the 24hr news media circus whipping everyone into obsession every time there’s a tragedy.

I think the way we regard guns in Australia is important. They are dangerous objects that are either used for work, or as a hobby by a small number. To a very large extent we don't worship or slobber over them.

I've fired a gun on three occasions (I was an Army Cadet, I quite enjoyed the experience) and have handled realistic replicas (backstage on set of a theater show). In both settings they're treated as risky objects. You are handed the gun, you use it, and then you hand it back to be locked up.

My grandfather is the only person in my family I know who ever owned a gun. He used to keep it in the cupboard under the stairs. He handed it in to police to be destroyed long ago - he felt that he didn't need it, and that the most likely outcome of keeping it was an accident that he would regret.

Personally, I'm very happy to live without guns around. If I do want to shoot, I would be able to comply with the regulations in my state fairly easily. It's a bit of paperwork but no worse than, e.g. acquiring powerful lasers, or being allowed to enter an aerodrome for flight training.

I didn't know this, but the Australia gun ban, just removed certain types of guns - about half the latest data I saw.

Australia still has plenty of legal guns around. And it's clearly still a problem with illegal guns. Not as big a problem as the US, but still a big problem.

"But the latest crackdown did little to shift attention from the body count: in the past 18 months, 13 men have been shot dead in a western Sydney turf war and there is no end to the bloodshed in sight."

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/23/more-...

>Australia isn’t really a success at solving the underlying social issues.

Definitely- the most recent mass shooting committed by an Australian national didn't even occur on Australian soil, but in Christchurch, NZ.

>our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power

As opposed to the US, whose cultural relationship with school shooters sees them made Person of the Year by a popular nationwide magazine. Their media reports stories of "Could [popular movie] result in mass shootings?" throughout the time it was in the theaters to the point you'd wonder if it was actually part of a marketing campaign.

Not actively promoting this particular kind of crime or the people who commit it would indeed be a good start to eliminating it but why do that when there's money and political hay to be made over it?

Is the crazy 24hr news cycle unique to the US?

There’s 24hr news most places around the world now and there’s been 24hr “global” news channels for decades too…

But it’s not the same as American news. For one thing American news is weirdly musical… like why the hell does all American news come with a subtle soundtrack trying to obviously steer my emotional reaction to what I’m seeing? Other places add music too in plenty of places often for the same reasons but it’s not the same level… American news basically has a soundtrack going almost all the time, it’s excessive and blatantly an attempt to manipulate the viewers emotions.

Do you have some examples of that? I don't recall any broadcast or cable news having a backing track. Many use sounds and music to introduce a segment, but I don't think any are running music in the background of the regular broadcast.

I don’t have any clips off hand and really don’t want to subject myself to an unnecessary dose of US news media haha… You are right about it not normally being played behind the in studio talent, but you can pretty quickly notice the semi-permanent background track once you start using paying attention to how they construct a “packaged segment” that has been pre-recorded and pre-produced, ready to cut to from the in studio talent.

It’s way more obvious when it’s a wedge issue like gun rights, drug legalisation, abortion, or anything political.

"The left" is not a monolith. There are plenty of leftist gun owners. It's a practical thing rather than a weird obsession, so it doesn't get as much press.

> It's a practical thing rather than a weird obsession, so it doesn't get as much press.

I don't know about that. I know plenty of people on the left that have gun 'obsessions'. I think it's just culturally unacceptable for them to talk about it. Here in Eastern Massachusetts, pretty much everybody (who doesn't tout their minority right-wing victim status on the back window of their pickup truck) will tell you they are anti-gun; but if you feel them out carefully, a good number of them will quietly admit they own guns and enjoy shooting. There are many, many hidden gun collections here.

That sounds like a similar situation to the Abilene paradox.

> The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".

How much of "the left" is actually about no guns, versus having a few hoops that you have to jump through first, à la (e.g.) Massachusetts:

* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...

Compared to: "Only in Texas: Lubbock jeweler offers free gun with engagement ring purchase":

* https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2016/10/25/only-in-tex...

In response to the idea that muskets were less dangerous I share the following copypasta

Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.

> The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".

The left actually says "more background checks", though there are an unreasonable group that goes for absolutely no guns.

There's also the questions about what to do with aftermarket triggers that allow for burst-firing or even fully-automatic firing, which are legal right now (and were used in the Las Vegas mass shooting attack). Banning certain items (ex: large-capacity magazines, trigger-mods, bump-stocks and the like) would still be an improvement.

It is my understanding that bump stocks are currently treated as machine guns, which is to say almost impossible to legally own in the US.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/12/26/2018-27...

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/white-collar-and-criminal-law/...

https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/2021/12/bump-stock-ban-heading-...

Bump-stocks remain a public political issue, likely heading to the Supreme Court.

It is no surprise that there's a legal challenge underway, but the Supreme Court has not granted certiorari and it is not clear that it will.

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gun-owners-of-am...

Man, HN is brutal sometimes.

I wish you hadn’t made your quip about the left saying “no guns”, because it isn’t important at all to your central point, which is that structural issues in the US prevent meaningful progress on gun control regardless of whether it’s good policy or the majority of people want it.

But you have like five people responding to that “left no guns” thing specifically, instead of to your real point, which is absolutely correct and the heart of the issue.

Here in Canada the "left" liberal government made it much harder to get a gun license. Then proceeded to mandate the vaccine, fired unvaccinated employees, denied them their EI, and banned about 6 million Canadians from flying to this day. When some truckers protested, they suspended the charter. I can see how many Americans would want to hold to their guns in light of the behaviour of governments over the last few years.

They didn’t “mandate the vaccines”, they required their employees to get vaccinated. If you didn’t want to receive a safe, effective vaccine that billions of people around the world have also received, you had the “freedom” to quit and find another employer.

Oh, also? Has anyone actually been fired by the federal government? A cursory search shows 1800 people are on unpaid leave, but they haven’t been terminated. 1800 people out of an estimated 320k employees.

Weird.

Please spend 15 seconds looking up what "the left" is actually arguing for before speaking in public about it. Because you appear to not have any idea.

Hint: it's what 92-96% of the US public consistently agrees with. Background checks without loopholes, for instance.

I would think that percentage would change if people knew what they were agreeing to. “Remove loopholes to get around background checks? Absolutely! Force private owners to report to the government who they sell a gun to, leading to a registry all all gun owners? Maybe not…”

Just curious, but have you ever purchased a firearm?

Background checks are standard procedure. I'm not sure what "loopholes" you are referring to. Usually this refers to private party sales. Do you want private party sales banned?

People often describe the fact that there isn't a background check for private sales in most US states as a loophole. Attempts to add such a requirement in some states, such as Washington have been clumsy and burdensome but it does seem like a good idea in principle.

Why do you think we don’t pass policy that >90% of people agree with? How do you propose to fix that problem?

(I’ll give you my personal opinion: we can’t because of structural flaws in the US political system, and the problem is impossible to fix.)

The Left is more than willing to take incremental harm-reduction approaches to manage America's gun addiction instead of going cold turkey, but even that is not an option thanks to the USA's anti-democratic Senate.

I'm pretty sure there are bullies in Serbia, too, and fraught home conditions. And there are the guns. What's missing? onesafari said:

> The root cause may be bullying combined with the media contagion effect.

You need the bullying (or other oppressive social condition) and the media contagion. And, as you say, you need the massive amounts of guns.

> but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.

It is not clear to me that your statement is true. Given the Second Amendment, given the Supreme Court (and, in particular, the current makeup of the Supreme Court), I'm not sure what can be done.

If you see a path, we'd all love to see the plan...

Nobody ever talks about restricting the first amendment instead of the second, but it would be just as effective for mass shootings.

But we probably wouldn’t even need to restrict it. If the president and other politicians shamed every media company that named the shooter when this happens we could probably make some progress.

Supporting dragontamer's claim regarding number of firearms:

According to a report[1] by Small Arms Survey in 2017, there were an estimated 120 civilian firmarms per 100 people in the USA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

That's almost twice as many as the next-closest nation.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20180620231909/http://www.smalla...

This argument would be obvious if USA had say twice the number of school shootings as the next-closes nation but it has ~36x [1]

What gives?

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...

That would be true if we assume the effect is linear, but why should it be? Is there evidence of linearity?

If the relationship were superlinear, then we'd expect to see much higher rates of mass shootings in places like Montana or Wyoming (where >60% of households have guns) and lower rates in California (where ~20% of households have guns). This does not seem to be the case.

There is a correlation chart[1] of gun ownership and gun deaths per state for 2013 in this article:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/gun-owners-stud...

(correlation does not explain causation, but it may help to guide analysis)

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20211204010352/https://www.mothe...

That is gun deaths, not gun homicides or mass shootings. Around 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides. A suicidal person will choose the most effective and painless method available to them, so if they have a gun around, they'll use it. This is a totally different problem than gun violence, but many activists will conflate the two.

Its not "conflation". Its recognition that background-checks, and delays, should reduce gun-violence AND cut back on suicides.

I'm not sure how much of an effect they would have on suicides. This may just be my stereotypical mental image, but I suspect that a lot of gun suicide victims have owned the gun in question for a long time, in which case a waiting period wouldn't help any more than a waiting period to buy a car would stop people driving off bridges.

Are there any numbers on how many people commit suicide with guns they bought in the last 6 months of their life?

Because they are sneaking suicides into the numbers. If you split the data up between suicides and homicides, the correlation disappears.

Upvoted and agreed, that's a reasonable complaint. Can you provide sources that illustrate the absence of correlation after dividing the dataset?

I haven't yet, although I did find this publication from Boston University positive correlation between increased gun ownership and increased non-stranger homicide rates: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4167105/

This post basically explains the bait-and-switch being used.

https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-...

The post also questions how studies like the one you linked are measuring gun ownership rate. Every reliable study uses % of suicides with guns as a proxy for gun ownership rates. RAND notes the same thing: "A fundamental limitation for all of the studies is the lack of direct measures of gun prevalence. All of the authors use FS/S as a proxy for gun prevalence" https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/fir...

https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/fir...

A lot of the shootings involved someone driving to different states.

Which ones? You can only buy guns in the state which you are a resident. You'd have to find a co-conspirator who is a resident of that state and who is willing to commit a felony to get you a gun. Or you'd have to live in one state and decide to drive to another state and murder people.

The Buffalo shooter bought his rifle legally in New York. Same goes for the most recent shooter in Texas. The San Bernardino shooters bought their firearms legally in California, then modified magazines to accept more than 10 rounds. The Orlando night club shooter bought his guns legally. He even had a valid security guard license.

The only example I know of is Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter. He lived in Nevada and bought a WASR-10 (an AK variant) there, then drove to California to massacre people. While the WASR-10 is illegal in California, very similar rifles are legal in the state. Had he lived in California, he could have purchased a Palmetto State Armory GF3 (or any other CA-legal AK clone), then removed the grip fin and modified the magazine to accept 30 rounds.

Some states actually do allow non-residents to buy rifles, but I believe handguns are federally restricted to residents only.

Yes I did slightly simplify. There is an exception for buying rifles and shotguns from a gun store, but that still requires passing a background check and everything. Also the rifle or shotgun must be legal in the state you reside. And it is illegal to privately sell a gun to a non-resident. If the buyer is from another state, you must go through an FFL.

The point I was trying to make is that people cannot take advantage of less restrictive gun laws in neighboring states. Almost every mass shooter either got their guns legally or stole them from a close relative (often by murdering that relative). There's no glaring legal loophole that these people are using.

>> then removed the grip fin and modified the magazine to accept 30 rounds.

What an oddly specific comment.

I used to live in California. They have silly laws that require a "fin" on the grip (so you can't wrap your hand around it) and 10 round magazines. Once I moved, I fixed those annoyances.

On second thought it's kinda of a dumb comment. I'd retract it if I could.

A theory: the number of firearms (which translates into how accessible they are) isn't a linear scaling factor in the problem.

Comparative population could be relevant, although also doesn't explain the statistics you reference.

To try to prove/disprove the argument: has the prevalence (or nature) of bullying changed?

> Are there no Bullies in say, the United Kingdom?

Quite possibly, not much.

It's something that varies a lot from one culture to another, and you need a lot of it, unchecked for years to destroy a person.

There's a paper that was presented at an American Psychology Association conference on the media contagion effect. I think this might actually be the original study. It mentions "Profiles of shooters indicate that they are often socially isolated and suffer a pattern of ostracization or bullying, yet they tend toward narcissism."[1] It also mentions that these three traits - depression, social isolation and pathological narcissism are largely intertwined.

[1] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contag...

I'd say there are a number of angles from which to tackle the gun violence problem, but this would surely be one of them. Plus, worth dealing with independent of guns anyway. I wonder if there are links (including inverse relationships) between depression/isolation and classroom sizes or intensity of curriculum or single-sex schools. High school puts hormonal teenagers in a competitive environment every week day for hours; not everyone will cope well with that crucible.

Is there a stronger element of the individual and individual glory/success/achievement in the US than other countries that might explain the narcissism?

Bullying doesn't even describe half of it. There are many people who feel abandoned by everyone. It's extremely lonely for some people, especially in today's age where the default is NOT to go hang out in person with friends. The default is staring down at your phone and getting hooked on messaging and media tunnels.

I think this is the correct answer. Guns enable these incidents, but they're of course not the root cause. Bullying is a common motivation, but I don't think it's exactly the root cause either. It can be seen as a mental health issue, but I don't think that's the most instructive analytical lens.

The problem is our lack of social fabric. Kids don't have enough friends. They spend too much time looking at screens, and they can't imagine positive futures that they'd like to live out. They don't have enough guidance from parents and other adults to put them on a more positive path.

There was an article in recent months about the loss of communal spaces for adolescents. Put a group of teenagers in a park just hanging out, and a suspicious local will dob them in as loitering. Play a noisy game of football and someone reports it. Other places are pay-to-play. Or have alcohol and designed for adults.

This isn't the one I was thinking about, but is on the same topic: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43323577

It almost sounds like he's the victim in your mind...just consider that there are millions of people that are bullied, and people with mental illness that do not do anything close to this. He targeted little kids. An obivious ego driven attempt at grandizing the scale of his revenge. This was all about him. A purely selfish act. Exaggerated to a scale to mock life itself.

Family members are rationalizing why he might have done this after the fact. Inferring a causal effect from bullying to murdering children from family member testimony seems very biased.

This is my usual thinking also but in this case, I don"t think the 18 years old shooter was victim of bullying from elementary school kid.

Kids get bullied everywhere, in every culture. It's part of growing up.

I have no comment on the contagion effect.

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