America’s greatest export is war. we’re a very violent nation. every generation since the founding has had a major conflict to attend - but most of our wars in the last 30 years or so havent involved a lot of “boots on the ground”. that pent up rage requires an outlet. mass killings/shootings/etc are a direct result.
adding to that, handguns are very easy to obtain - you can legally purchase them easily enough but there’s also a very active black market where cash is king and questions are not asked, backgrounds are not checked. since Americans are legally permitted to own/carry firearms (as enshrined in our founding governmental documents), the system cannot change. it’s not politically acceptable to request a change. no career politician is going to burn their entire life’s work in something that is destined to fail. even considering is is borderline insane.
The Internet and modern media. We’re constantly blasted with stuff that makes us feel shitty because we don’t have this or that, but someone else does, or companies are telling you that no one will like you if you don’t buy their product.
Before the internet, everyone’s lives weren’t on display for the whole world to see and the only people you had to compare yourself to were those in your community.
Reporting and tracking. Before the automatic weapons ban you had prolific bank robbers that shot their way out of many situations, but it wasn’t generalized to mass shootings.
Rico was created to combat organized crime in the 70s. Lots of people were killed, but it was presented as an organized crime problem not a mass shooting problem.
Since Columbine you have school shootings. One of the biggest predictors has become media reporting of a shooting. That’s obviously not the sole cause though.
Essentially the US has always been violent, it just hasn’t always been lumped into a single mass shootings bucket. Rival gangs fighting is totally different than a school shooter, and a murder suicide is also entirely different.
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.
It is a lot more complicated than that. There are strong cultural reasons we defunded them but in essence they had become so toxic it was best to close them.
Almost no mass shootings were carried out by someone with a serious mental illness. Almost all of them made a conscious decision to do what they did and made a plan to do it. They learned to do what they did from internet forums, news reports of other shootings, abhorrent “influencers,” and the like, and they didn’t do what they did impulsively or based on a psychotic though process. Psych hospitals and deinstitutionalization have nothing at all to do with mass shootings
On the other hand, I would posit that anyone who would perform a mass shooting is, by definition, mentally unwell, and the loss of mental health resources can only make things worse.
When you say “mentally unwell” though, how do you even define that? Psych hospitals are there to treat psychiatric conditions, eg schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, catatonia, borderline personality disorder, etc. Psych hospitals are not pre-crime units where you send someone who is going to commit a shooting.
By saying the mass shooting problem could be fixed by having more psych hospital beds or bringing back institutionalization means you think either of these would have stopped someone. There is an easy test here…how many mass shooters were sent to a psych hospital before they killed people, were treated for homicidal thoughts, and we’re released due to deinstitutionalization? For how many mass shooters were their homicidal thoughts or plans known, but they didn’t get help at all due to a lack of psych hospitals?
It really easy to dismiss people who commit crimes as automatically mentally ill, but the reality is almost none of them meet criteria for a mental illness. Instead they murdered people because they chose to, and they meet every definition of competent to stand trial after they do it.
This sort of narrative perpetuates the popular thinking that people with a mental illness are scary and dangerous when they actually commit violent crimes at a lower rate than the general population
Why do they have to go to hospitals? Wouldn’t more affordable mental healthcare and better access to good metal health professionals also help? No one in this thread said lock them up.
Oh 100%, but I’m responding to someone who cited “the closure of public mental health institutions” as a reason for increased mass shootings, which I vehemently disagree with
We haven’t had AR15s for 200 years. The real answer though is more likely cultural, because there are plenty of countries with permissive gun laws who have much lower rates of gun homicide than the US.
Yeah, but while they had it rough in a lot of ways, they didn’t have stuff constantly blasting them in the face telling them how inadequate they are, bullies would only mess with those they bullied when they were physically close to each other, they didn’t have a chance to see pictures of hundreds of thousands of people’s “good” lives and wish they had that, etc…
Pretty much, the internet, and the media in general is to blame. If you didn’t know how good of a time people were having an hour away from you, you weren’t missing anything. As they say, ignorance is bliss.
Nah we used to toss anyone with even a lisp into a room with padded walls until we could get the doctor to stab his brain or electrocute them until they’re “right” again or just left in there to get assaulted until they die.
yes, but we closed all insane asylums/mental wards too. some hospitals have a few beds dedicated for that but it’s not the massive infrastructure of the past.
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.
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