Easy access to a surplus of guns is one component of the problem, but we need to ask ourselves whether or not there's something in American culture or lifestyle that drives people to keep doing this. "Unintended" media glorification of the shooter is certainly part of the problem, but maybe not all of it.
Pretty good data here. You can see that the proportions of the number of guns per capita between countries does not scale to the number of firearm homicides (Norway, damn!). Also, the overall homicide rate is dropping, so that's good. I wasn't aware that the legislation to prevent the sale of automatic weapons and expand background checks was defeated in Congress. Thanks, NRA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(King_novel)#Connections_to_actual_school_shootings
I've passed my 20-year high school reunion and I can honestly say there has never been a time in my life without mass shootings. Here's one of the first things I ever read in the paper.
My aunt lived on the same street as the Huberty family. The wife was a nice lady the times I recall seeing her in her front yard.
One of the first memories I have is of the Apollo 17 launch. We watched this at the grandparent's house as they were the ones with the color TV and we all knew this was the last landing. The next big news memory I have is "I don't like Mondays". This took place not 5 miles from where I was in school at the time. I did not realize this was the first "modern" school shooting.
This weekend I had to explain to some kids that there was a time when a color TV was rare, small and you have a lot of status if you owned one. All three channels in living color!
My dad's parents were born in the 1800's. There are times that I wonder, on a board like this, if I am the only one who can make that claim.
I remember this one, in Canada in 1975. I was in BC when it happened. Several years later I was living in Ontario. One of my friends told me about her traumatizing experience. She had been shot in the foot during that particular rampage when she was 15.
Your age is more significant than first apparent here I think. It means this isn't a generational thing. The mass shootings aren't a result of specific circumstances for a single generation. Or else, our two generations, having grown up watching these tradgedies, wouldn't continue to commit them.
At the same time though, this isn't an 'American problem.' It's a late 20th century Amercian problem. There must have been a cultural shift in the late 1900s that produced it. I have no idea what that shift was, but there's this temporal component that I think is really important here too. Not totally connected to your point, and probably pretty obvious to you, but something I hadn't thought about too closely before. Maybe you have some idea about what the shift was.
I think there are several mundane factors at play. Well, I think there are three.
(1) assume one in a million people are crazy enough to mow down a crowd. Right now, that means there's 320 people walking around these United States, waiting to blow. In 1995, there were 260. In 1975, there were 215. In 1955, there were 165. In 1900 there were 76. We're twice as likely now as we were 50 years ago through sheer dumb statistics.
(2) I remember getting a color television. It had four channels. There were three newspapers, the local (which didn't come out on Thursdays or Saturdays) and two state-wide. News was on at six and ten because the Mountain Time Zone is demographically irrelevant enough that nobody time delays it. In the time since I've learned to read we've gone from rotary phones to touch tone to answering machines to cellular to PCS to texting to LTE. The Internet has gone from a thing with acoustic couplers and daisy wheel printers that talked to a select few universities to this thing you get on your goddamn watch. I did my book reports with encyclopedias and inter-library loan. I couldn't find every bit of information everywhere ever with a properly-formed query. That sort of thing makes information ubiquitous, which means when you want to look up every school shooting there ever was, it's a few keystrokes away. 20 years ago it would have taken a couple dedicated weeks at a university library to even get a broad overview.
(3) It's a lot harder to die these days. No really. It is. We had any number of cars with cocktail skewer steering columns. I remember Lee Iacocca talking about what an economic drain airbags would be. Everybody smoked cigarettes. AIDS would kill you dead if the Russians didn't do it first. Shit - where I grew up I had classmates who died of plague. Not to mention, you know, war. The US went from the Spanish-American War to WWI to WWII to Korea to Vietnam and then a big fat nothing. 76,000 dead in Vietnam, something like 400 in the Gulf War 20 years later.
People didn't really fixate on Ed Gein until the Internet. Ancient serial killers didn't matter much. But since then we've sort of started this escalation of stupidity where people are trying for high scores. Anybody remember Kip Kinkel? Dude got himself his own Frontline special until Harris and Kliebold and they got their own Gus Van Sant movie. And now the powerless white kids with no war to go get glory in rack up their high scores against each other, crazy as fuck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States
One of the worst decades for school homicides was 1900-1910. That list is far longer than I thought it would be.
And the perpetrators of those 1900-1909 list include
Members of the school board
- During an exciting school board committee elections, H. C. Branstetter attempted to murder H. B. Eastman. One shot was fired, but the gun was struck down and the weapon was snatched from Branstetter before he could shoot again.
Teachers (Read this one)
- Teacher Fletcher R. Barnett shot and killed another teacher, Eva C. Wiseman, in front of her class at a school. After shooting at a pupil who came to help Miss Wiseman and wounding himself in a failed suicide attempt, he waited in the classroom until a group of farmers came to lynch him. He then ran out of the school building, grabbed a shotgun from one of the farmers and shot himself, before running away and leaping into a well where he finally drowned. The incident was likely sparked by Wiseman's refusal to marry Barnett.
School Directors
- Two school directors got into a heated discussion over school business. When Director Samuel Egly threatened Director William Kling with an ax, Kling shot Egly through the heart, killing him.
Principals
- E. E. Mangum was shot through the head and killed by the principal of the high school, Professor V. A. Alfonso. Mangum remonstrated with Woodward because he had administered a severe whipping to Mangum's 15-year-old son. Mangum finally lost his temper and shot Woodward through the wrist. Woodward was handed a pistol by a bystander and shot Mangum through the head.
and all the other usual suspects.
I meant to refer to mass shootings. Most of the ones you reference seem to be either accidents or personal matters that were 'resolved' on school grounds. There was a graphic here a while back that showed a timeline of mass shootings. Definitely has gotten worse over the past quarter century.
Obligatory Onion reference :
http://www.theonion.com/article/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-36131
- Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said the gunman was shot and killed during an exchange of gunfire with officers at Umpqua Community College. Hanlin refused to name the killer, saying, "I will not give him the credit he probably wanted ... for this cowardly act. You will never hear me mention his name."
- A federal law enforcement source identified the gunman as a local Oregon man, Chris Mercer.
Well fuck
I've been to 4chan after that image was posted, and there is a lot of congratulation to the scum that did this. So far I have only seen one post denouncing that guy (at least one that really popped up among so much crap), and reddit is too busy complaining about 4chan and the algorithms.
Nobody is blaming guns.
This is a sad story to read, 10 people were cheated in regards to their life. I wish the shooter would have changed his mind and let these people live.
I don't understand how this keeps happening - whether it be due to gun accessibility, or not.
Is it becoming a fad amongst the angsty? A horrible, terrifying fad?
We need to enforce gun restrictions!
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Asides, the person was mentally ill, we should focus on curing that.
Every time a white person is a killer, it's an illness, of course, but when a black person does it, he is a thug.
This is a sign of white/male entitlement, and we need to stop letting men think they deserve the world.
Clearly he was a frustrated young man without a place thanks to feminists. It would all be fine if women weren't so stuck up.
The person was in poverty, living a bad life, with no care, how can we not see that the medicare system is broken, we need to put more money into it.
The killer played x game or watched y movie. It's clear that violence in the media is encouraging these people to murder, we need to stop normalizing and desensitizing our youth.
Here we see the killer playing table tennis, clearly a sign of his deranged makeup.
