This is not to say economic desperation alone is the cause of gun violence, but easy access to guns, the complete disdain for funding healthcare mental or otherwise, the lack of vacation for most workers, these are all things which don’t make well people.
In my eyes it comes down to the possibilities of building up and maintaining some modest wealth. Most prominent examples are housing prices. With rising prices as we’ve seen in the past 2 decades, many people are forced to remain renters instead of being able to buy their own house or appartment. That’s wealth distribution upwards.
If you have some modest amount of money, say some 10k EUR, trying to invest that such that it doesn’t loose value is close to impossible. The whole finance industry seems to be set up to suck up any gains that these investments can get. As soon as you can juggle a few 100k EUR, a whole other range of investments opens up to you. That’s wealth distribution upwards.
In Germany (I don’t know about other countries) if you work to live and earn little, you’re taxed little, but you don’t earn enough to save anything anyways. If you earn more, you are taxed much more heavily than someone merely lives off a passive income. That’s wealth distribution upwards.
I wouldn’t be surprised, if this graph doesn’t concern itself with passive income anyways.
As society has gotten more dense people feel like society has pushed them aside, which it often does. Their families have increasingly less time for their loved ones and dont provide a fallback network.
Bombarded with the lives of the rich and famous which we will never be… might as well be infamous.
Those have existed since the turn if the last century. Ever wonder why the 1911 is called that? Because that’s the year it was adopted. The Mauser C96 was even earlier and extremely popular all over the world. Self loading arms were being produced as early as the 1890’s and were in widespread adoption everywhere by the 1920’s.
And throughout the 1930s you had bootleggers and gangsters with Tommy guns terrorizing urban areas across America with gangland shootings and widespread abductions since they outgunned the police. What happened? The feds got bigger guns and passed gun control to get machine guns off the street. And this was actually possible back then because the NRA was still a legitimate civil society organization emphasizing responsible gun ownership and not yet a glorified marketing campaign for arms manufacturers.
The OPs question is basically a false premise born of forgetting history.
You’re kind of behind the times, the NRA is pretty vilified in gun forums etc for being pretty ineffectual. They’re kind of coasting on boomer memberships or private ranges/events that require NRA membership or NRA events that… You guessed it, find a way to require membership. There are a lot of other advocacy groups that are more legal battle based.
@dope Once a meme hits mainstream consciousness it is tough to get it to go away. Columbine out school shootings in the mind of every child of that generation, and since then toxic online forums filled with trolls have kept the idea alive be it "an hero" "unalive yourself" and just generally the nihilistic attitude of if you feel bade enough about yourself to consider killing yourself, you might as well take out some others you hate with you. This is mental illness at its core, but with the enablement of technology and toxic online "community" culture.
Then there are spin off effects of this mentality combined with the impression of the efficacy of terrorism from a psychological imprint perspective, and some narcissists will mass kill for "the cause". Again mental illness at its core, with a different "community" dynamic.
In both of these cases it is the meme, in the original sociology sense of the word, that has caused the rise of the behavior. The cultural condition of alienation and anonymous communication on the rise, combined with overall eroded access to in-person and in-patient mental health services due to the privatized health system, keeps the meme breeding in the alienated cultural class.
@Siegfried and there have been mass shootings outside the USA, don't forget what happened in Norway for example. In the US the mental health and social support infrastructure is weak, so the meme is actualized more often.
The complete unwinding of social safety nets, mental health interventions, and educational funding from the Reagan years finally culminated in a completely vulnerable population. Then we began the era of 24 hour news, extremist Identity politics, and just a general erosion of any semblance of shared American identity.
Well for one we redefined mass shooting a few years back which absolutely spiked the numbers because now any robbery gone wrong or gang turf war gets classified in as a MS.
So when people see 300 MS they think 300 columbines or 300 Aurora theatre shootings. Most of those are much smaller and have nothing to do with the lone wolf shooter that people think of when the words “mass shooting” come up.
The other reason is cultural significance. There’s an increased likelihood of a shooting in a place where a previous mass shooting has occurred. The media spending weeks covering the incidents while plastering people’s likeness all over the place shows the disenfranchised extremist that they too can become infamous in a blaze of glory which leads to increased incidents of mass shooting as well.
Lastly, I think there’s a general air of “there’s no hope and I have no purpose” among people today that previous generations never had to deal with in the same manner. Add that on top of the previously mentioned things and it multiplies.
So basically media coverage and the sociopolitical divide becoming more of a chasm. Access to firearms hasn’t changed much in that time and firearms technology had semi automatic weapons invented for much longer than that.
Mass shootings were common before 30 years ago, but generally only gangsters had automatic weapons, so the non-gang/mafia related mass shootings usually only involved revolvers or shotguns and were over pretty quickly.
Mass shootings were common before 30 years ago, but generally only gangsters had automatic weapons
Production of automatic weapons for civilians has been outlawed since ‘86. Very, very few civilians own automatic weapons. Blaming something virtually nobody has is nonsensical.
One variable that I think doesn’t get looked at seriously is class size and school funding. Ask any North American teacher, and you’ll get a grim assessment on the trajectory of schooling since the 90’s. When teachers have more students than they can handle, it’s no surprise that things get out of hand.
I’d argue that part of the solution is more teachers per student. This enables better relationships between faculty and students, and better opportunities for mentorship. Build more schools, hire more teachers, pay them well, make school a place where teachers want to be, and where kids can thrive.
But reforming the existing system is a hot potato that neither the left nor right wants to hold, so, here we are. The system itself is degraded to the point that it doesn’t have the resources to self-correct. We need vision, wisdom, funding, and leadership, to steer things in a new direction. I think that would go a long way in preventing a misguided kid from fermenting the idea that murdering people, or their own classmates, is an answer to their problems.
I don’t mean to paint school shootings as simply a rebellion against a malfunctioning system, but, we really need to look at the system and make sure it’s serving the students that have no choice but to be there.
Total speculation from my own experience… so maybe just me.
It seems like there is just a completely different culture surrounding guns that didn’t exist before (or just wasn’t so damn loud). I’m talking about the whole I need guns for “protection” because crime is out of control, the 2nd amendment SHALL NOT be infringed, “don’t tread on me,” I have guns and I’d like to see the government “try” and take them, etc. It’s like this delusional, childish owning a gun so you can tell people you own a gun… thing? Anyone else notice you can always tell who owns a gun by how dumb their bumper stickers are?
I talked to an older dude who went to my high school 20 years before me and he told me how him and a buddy often brought their rifles to school. It was never a “thing.” They might have gone hunting before school or something… I forget. But the whole attitude he had about it was the polar opposite of what it has become.
No one is coming for your guns guys. On that note, no one fucking cares either.
The NRA started out as a well respected advocacy group for hunters rights and environmental protection. Then they were captured by the arms manufacturing industry, so now their only goal is to sell more guns.
And after every major mass shooting there is a significant uptick in sales of guns and ammo, so the arms industry is financially motivated to contribute to the culture of gun rampage.
Yeah, that makes sense. It used to not be a partisan thing to be an NRA member either. But I suppose I can say that about any bullshit culture war issue nowadays. This whole politics as a team sport thing is cancer.
Owning a gun just seems like another way to show support for your team. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that if it were somehow illegal to tell people that you own a gun, firearm sales would plummet. Otherwise, how would anyone know how cool they are?
The NRA has a bloody hand in promoting this culture. Decades of escalating fearmongering brought them members, money, and political influence. It also took them far off course from their original goals promoting safety and responsibility. They now exist solely to promote more firearms sales at any cost, and actively push legislation against any attempts to regulate ownership. I enjoy going to the range once in a while to do some target shooting, and used to hunt years ago, but will never be a NRA member. I have no respect for this organization and what they’ve become.
I love how all the people talking about how semi auto guns have been around for X years and blah blah blah completely ignore the massive uptick in production, sale, and distribution of those guns in the past 30-40 (or so).
People have more or less been able to buy assault style semi auto rifles for a long time, but they only “recently” (I guess 30-40 years might not be so recent?) started actually buying them in large numbers. Mostly thanks to the NRA, if I had to point a finger.
The problem is that a really angry or disturbed or whatever person with access to a high rate of fire weapon and lots of ammo (because they’ve been told that next election Jack Johnson or John Jackson will be taking their guns) can literally just pick it up and go kill half a dozen or more people in 30 minutes. There’s nothing we can do to intercept that. (And “good guys with guns” have a terrible track record, including cops.)
We even had a little experiment in the 90s where people were buying a lot of these and then we banned them. Mas shootings (4+ victims according to the FBI if I recall correctly) had been going up but then they went down until …
W and his Republican stooges (or maybe he was the stooge?) let the ban expire, mass shootings started ticking up.
The drivers that lead people to mass violence probably are the “root” of the problem, and I would guess hypothetically that if we could snap our fingers and solve those it wouldn’t matter how many or what type of guns there are out there. The problem is that we aren’t even trying to fix those problems, and the Republican Party is actively making them worse, AND we’re making these literal weapons of war easily available to everyone.
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