PSA: about 2/3 mass shootings are domestic violence related. If you want to fix mass shootings, start at fixing the household.
https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40621-021-00330-0
You can ABSOLUTELY make a good point about mass shootings being the result of mental health disorders or domestic violence, and we should ABSOLUTELY be doing what we can as a society to fix those problems… but we can’t ignore the 100% common denominator in literally every mass shooting… which is guns.
The rest of the world has deep, deep family problems, too. Yet doesn’t have these problems.
And a lot of it has guns too.
The biggest outlier with guns in America is the politicization and them.
Look at Scandinavia, where gun ownership is incredibly high and many firearm laws less-strict than in the US: It’s a region of the world that has most of its shit figured out, and having guns there isn’t a big deal because the rate of violence is so low.
Here in the US, we’ve got a broken social system, essentially zero mental health care for those who really need it, easy access to firearms, and hyper-politicization around firearms that pushes mentally-unstable people towards gun ownership.
When the unstable conspiracy-theory nutjobs hear liberals saying that gun ownership is bad they’re predictably start stocking up on guns and ammo - specifically the black guns the political left keeps trying to ban. And then they snap.
That’s how the guns that make up about 1% of overall firearm deaths started being used much more frequently in mass shootings.
We do need an honest national conversation about guns and their availability, but neither side of the political aisle is willing to really, truly be honest in their policies towards firearms. So we aren’t able to have that conversation and what we end up with is the worst of all outcomes.
I do wonder why mass shootings weren’t nearly as common before 1980s/1990s, when the United States had even less gun control than we do now. There is more to it than just access to guns for sure. Don’t get me wrong, I still think stricter gun control would most definitely help, but I wonder what other factors are causing the number of mass shootings to go up.
The rise of conservative media, probably. You’ve had decades of fox news and talk radio doing their thing, and now we have stochastic terrorism.
Couple that with the concentrated conservative efforts to reduce the quality of education in America - less educated people are more susceptible to those conservative media tactics. They can’t keep control over all of the craziness they peddle, look at the House of Representatives - they lost the plot and now we are stuck dealing with the shit show they cultivated.
fix the household
Nice dog whistle for systematic problems with capitalism
easy and cheap ways to buy guns
create a system with no hope to move up in life when you’re poor
have a news media that creates paranoia, to sell ads
Yea it’s sooooo weird “How the FUCK is captialism the cause of mass shootings lol”
Because unchecked capitalism means paying people as little as possible to maximize profits, which means people are underpaid which causes undue stress at home which leads to bad shit happening.
Rampant profiteering off of the backs of laborers for the sake of the few. You think those laborers have the ability to maintain a happy and balanced home life after being exploited by capitalists?
Tons of lobbying money goes into making sure those laws never happen, shootings cause a rise in firearm sales. Rinse, repeat. Any talk of well regulated militia bullshit is just lip service to the useful idiots who keep them rich.