This has become a movement of sorts. I can't shake the feeling that a utter lack of hope and creativity is leading people to kill others when they often just killed themselves.
Yes, neither have helped, but I don't see they have changed at the rate of this phenomenon. It seems like a genuine trend in the expression of despair. I think social media may be no less a contributing factor than guns, gun culture, and a lack of resources, possibility, and even norms for empathic individual interventions.
Yeah, I think the isolation + fringe opinions part is key. Lord knows there is a niche rabbit-hole for every bizarre desire and destructive emotion on the internet. Micro-communities can now easily form around fleeting ideas and phases of despair, giving them a place to take root and grow. Then add the intersection with gun culture and you're baking a cake. I've had similar thoughts to mk in that what used to be suicides are now turned outward. I'm not sure that the hopelessness or despair have gone up though. I think it's more that those with that despair have access to networked micro-communities that celebrate taking others out with you, they see the media reward others who have, the constantly growing list of others who have done the same, all against a backdrop of a culture where the NRA add below is mainstream for large communities in our country:
1977: 1988: Yet even the most thorough timelines don't go back past '84. Used to be we'd talk about school shooters to the point where Kurt Russell played one. Now? Now the NRA and their lickspittles instruct us to shut the fuck up because apparently "copycats." Access to guns has not appreciably changed since Kennedy was shot. Yet mass shootings are through the roof. Know what has changed?