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Comment by pretoriusB | Hacker News Reader

>Given what we know of spree shooters around the world and in the US, they strike me as predominantly desperate, mentally ill people.

No, we mostly know them in the US, by an order of magnitude more than other western countries. The same with serial killers: the US is up there with some third world nations for more prolific killers, and unsurpassed for total serial killer count, so much that Wikipedia devotes its own page to US serial killers which is larger than the sum page for the rest of the world.

And, desperate, mentally ill people? Could also be the products of a desperate, mentally ill society.

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    > So much that Wikipedia devotes its own page to US serial killers.

Aside from any of this Wikipedia devotes a lot of pages to US-specific things because it has a lot of contributors in the US. You shouldn't draw any other conclusion from it than that. You'll see a lot of US-bias and US-specific coverage on any topic on the English Wikipedia.

Hello? Someone was claiming the same about other Western countries, so I compiled these lists of mass shooting events in Western Europe in just this century:

From Wikipedia, school shootings in Europe in this century, last two numbers are killed and wounded:

  R., Georg, 18, Sep. 17 2009, Germany, 0, 10-15
  Kretschmer, Tim, 17, March 11, 2009, Germany, 15, 9-13
  De Gelder, Kim, 20, Jan. 16/23,, 2009, Belgium, 4, 12
  Saari, Matti Juhani, 22, Sep. 23, 2008, Finland, 10, 1-3
  Auvinen, Pekka-Eric, 18, Nov. 7, 2007, Jokela, Finland, 8, 1
  Bosse, Bastian, 18, Nov. 20, 2006, Germany, 0, 22
  Steinhäuser, Robert, 19, April 26, 2002, Germany, 16 1

Other spree shooting in Europe in this century:

  Merah, Mohammed, 23,  March 11–22, 2012, Toulouse & Montauban, France, 7, 8
  Amrani, Nordine, 33,  Dec. 13, 2011, Liège, Belgium, 6, 123 (he also used grenades)
  Breivik, Anders Behring, 32, July 22, 2011, Norway, 75, 242 (a bomb killed 8)
  van der Vlis, Tristan, 24, April 9, 2011, Netherlands, 6, 17
  Radmacher, Sabine, 41, Sep. 19, 2010, Germany, 3, 18 (arson was also used)
  Bird, Derrick, 52, June 2, 2010, United Kingdom, 12, 11
  Sacco, Angelo Secondo, 54, June 28, 2005, Italy, 3, 9
  Antonello, Mauro, 40,  Oct. 15, 2002, Italy, 7
  Durn, Richard, 33,  March 27, 2002, France, 8, 19
  Selamet, Ozan, 42,  Jan. 18, 2002, Belgium, 6 (2 strangled)
  Roux-Durrafourt, Jean-Pierre, 44,  Oct. 29, 2001, France, 4, 7
  Leibacher, Friedrich, 57, Sep. 27, 2001, Switzerland, 14, 18
  Kaya, Hakan, 24,  Dec. 22, 2000, Germany, 6

I'm confident that the US cannot hold a candle to Germany, Russia, Cambodia, Bosnia, etc., when it comes to prolific murdering. If you only want to consider individual / non-cooperating killers, they exist in similar proportion across most societies.

Another option is that they are the products of a dysfunctional medical system. In particular, a pretty common recurring feature is that the shooters turn out to have been on antidepressants which are known to cause aggression and/or suicidal tendencies.

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