Here’s a must-read article from the NYT, linking US mass shootings to the number of guns in circulation in the US. The article is clear, simple and full of graphic material, benchmarking against other countries. It’s strange, most foreigners understand the societal risks from guns but conservative Americans still fight for their basic frontier freedoms to defend their families. Thoughts?
Sadly, Dr Alf is correct, although added to the number of guns, is the fact that many of the people who go on shooting rampages are lonely single men with some form of opiate addiction.
A few look like staged events because as several people I know who have had military and special forces training the number of people dispatched in a short time frame would be impossible for someone without such training. If we exclude those instances we are left with disaffected and lonely young men nursing grudges or consumed with rage.
Cutting the number of guns is not going to stop the rage and loneliness, so perhaps this latter aspect of the equation needs to be addressed as the “winner take all ” society which America has become tends to breed a small group of angry losers and disaffected young men (no mass shooters are female and very few mass shooters have wives or girlfriends or partners of any kind).
Short of gun control, perhaps the type of gun could be looked at, so that assault rifles capable of wiping out a whole town could be restricted.