It may have been a factor in a few cases, but I think people are being called out there for blaming a CIA program for school shootings rather than the woeful lack of mental health care and easy access to guns.
Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis.
https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/ranking-states
Interestingly, a small percentage of violent crime is directly attributed to mental health issues. Most self harm.
The definition of "mass shooting" leads to discrepancies like 20 vs. 600 for 2020 depending on which agencies definition is used. By number it looks bad for the US even if per capita compared to other countries. But more than half of all gun deaths in the US are suicides, and mass shootings are less than 0.5 or 0.2 percent of all homicides depending on which span of years you use.
I am a less of a gun control advocate than one for mental health access and prophylactic measures. Gun control is a red herring. The genie is out of the bottle. Bad people will procure guns or make them from parts or scratch. Not that hard really given the demand and money available to do it by drug cartels and other criminal organizations. Politicians keep saying "Guns are the number one killer of kids in the US". Based on a NEJM study that defines "kids" as 1 to 19 years of age. 18 and 19-year-olds are adults. Most deaths involving guns occur in the 17 to 19-year-old span are typically gang related. It also includes suicides ("In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC.") and citizens defending themselves with guns and being successful at it along with the police shootings in self defense.
Suicides still occur in relatively large numbers in countries with few guns in the hands of their citizens. They just use another method.
As the PSA from the 70s stated, "Matches don't start forest fires. People do." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEW4Ha040w)
And I would add "Guns don't kill people. People do."
How many of the people who perpetrate school shootings had the skill to build their own gun, or the criminal connections to procure one illegally?
Statistics need context. The term "mass shooting" is defined differently by different agencies/organizations in the US as well as all over the world. England also has the highest rate of tornadoes per land area in the world, but nobody would think they were at risk for being harmed by a tornado in England vs. the US.
You started with school shootings, singling out California. Texas is by far more prone to mass shootings and I wager statistically equal to California per-capita.
Hawaii has nearly-as-strict gun laws as California but incomparably lower violence by any measure. It’s a better example of your argument. The linked mental health web site ranks it at 7.
On the other hand, the death toll in undisputed mass shootings has skyrocketed since the defeat of the assault weapons ban.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/stabbing-...
If it's not a per-capita statistic, then it's basically just a population map as CA is the most populous state by far. A quick google search shows the top 3 states are CA, TX and FL - ie, the 3 most populous states in the US.
If ice cream is 100 paces away from you, you're less likely to eat it than if it's right in front of you. It's basic psychology that the greater the friction to satisfy our impulses, the less likely we are driven by them. It's maddeningly obvious. Similarly if everyone else was eating ice cream. We're social creatures, we emulate what we see others do.
This is the frustrating thing about this topic: it's a discussion about harm reduction, but people don't treat it that way and just throw up their hands and say 'oh it'd be the same without' when the data and logic don't support that.
In decision making parlance, it's a classic perfect is the enemy of the good response. In HN parlance, this is a question of floats not ints. In gamer parlance, this is a question of DPS and AOE, and how much nerfing guns lowers it. I don't know how many more ways we can say it to get through to folks.
Except that these drugs are likely used in lots of places in the world, and that large school shootings often is a uniquely American concept.
For example, of children under 19 in 2012, about 0.5% of Dutch or German children were prescribed antidepressants, while it's 1.6% of American children: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293642487_Trends_an...
Similarly, among the general population, Americans use some 3x as much benzodiazepines per capita as Canadians. And the Canadians are drug crazed compared to the Australians, who use about half what the Canadians do.
Before the shooting it was accounted (and reported in papers) a homeless woman was shouting (paraphrased) “they’re going to shoot you, you’re all going to die!” The man who did the shooting was a white terrorist and these run government contracted “safe houses” all over America.
Stephen Paddock used a "bump stock" on otherwise stock off-the-shelf rifles. The same could be done with almost any semiautomatic rifle:
White hate has an erotic desire for the mayhem. These don’t mind collateral damage. Particularly where this true motive will not be suspected.
If you’ve ever wondered how does this whole terror thing work if everyone thinks the assailants are such degenerates?
The devastation is for you. The “purpose” is for someone else. Someone disgruntled, someone proving anyone can be gotten to at any time, someone proving to their like minded that they will go as far as it takes (where others will not go “far enough”), someone sending a coercive message (think the govs will tell you they’re being extorted?)
Terror is a ploy, not a reasonable dialogue. They’re not trying to tell “you” anything, other than the futility that “nothing you can do about it”. That is how submission works.
And I am describing Power here, those of the voices in our heads. Not some actions of a lone gunman.
Who is the "They" in "They're", in "Power", in "those"?
And FWIW I don't have any voices in my head except my own, which is laughing right now. It is pretty infectious laughter!8-))
The “civilian” run CIA contracted safe houses you may take with grains of salt, yet this is how things have been done for a long while. The CIA actually lost some of their best operatives, assassinated on US soil by this thought control power coup.
Also their navy seals, marine super soldiers, and countless others (who will go on uncounted.)
Whitemanistan America has been the most dangerous place in the world for lawful military assets over the last 6 years.
There are instances of people running amok with firearms in the early 20th and 19th centuries:
> On August 13, 1903 [in Winfield, Kansas], 30-year-old Gilbert Twigg, armed with a 12-gauge double-barrelled shotgun, opened fire at a concert, killing six people and wounding at least 25, before killing himself. Three others died in hospitals afterward.
If we allow for clubs and knives alongside firearms, I'm fairly sure the phenomenon has happened since the beginning of time.
It was certainly rarer in the past. High-powered firearms were less common. And I think the very idea was simply less common. I suspect it's a mimetic virus, basically, a type of social contagion. They need to be an angry sociopath to begin with. And then they need the idea planted in their head. And it needs to be re-enforced repeatedly, a chain of thought that becomes inhabited in their minds, until it becomes realized.
The pattern of media coverage, outrage, and social modification in response (metal detectors in schools, etc.) is doing that re-enforcement. A shooter's face will be in the media, they will be the most hated person in their immediate community for the rest of living memory, and they will be the most hated figure nationally for about 15 minutes. The victim community might even be so terrified as to modify the law and policies at schools because of it. If there's any emotion that could sum up the motivation for the average spree killing, it's a generalized revenge on society. Those reactions are rewarding to someone who is seeking revenge; they made their impact.
A lot of time and other things changed in culture before mass shootings and crime took off. Television for one, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, drug culture, immigration reform, Vietnam war. If you believe that latent school shooting desire was always present, and just lacked a tool, you’d probably see it manifest in some way.
As for why we see more mass shootings today I think you need to consider that until the late 90s a shooter wouldn’t get publicity outside of their locale. So copycat shootings didn’t occur. On top of that the insane amount of psychoactive pills we prescribe. And no way to get people off the street early via institutions.
Lastly a general decay in our society, family structures, and communities.
This is not something to casually dismiss.
A few other sociological factors to consider given that the phenomenon of school shootings in the US has established itself in the past 50 years.[1]
The US population has doubled since 1950[2]; this means an increase in the (unaddressed) need for adequate health care and especially mental health care.
Domestic US gun business has grown its profits in this period of population growth. And, of course, the US is one of the few countries with a constitutional guarantee to protect its gun business, which results in political gamesmanship in a time of profits, instead of real social policy.
[1][a] _ https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-mass-school-sh...
[1][b] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
[1][c] _ https://www.chds.us/sssc/data-map/
[2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...