I have my own theories on this, but I don’t have enough data and research to present my theories as fact. I am just curious as to what other people think are the causes of this issue, and what might be some of the solutions?
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35 responses to “Why do you think mass shootings are so prevalent in the United States?”
It doesn’t matter how much data and research you have, theories will never be facts. Theory is just theory.
Mental illness, not guns is the root of the problem. Maybe the shooter wasn’t breast fed enough by his mother when he was an infant. Who knows? Maybe he was radicalized by some socialist college professor.
@immortal_pirate I never Said guns were the problem or that was my theory. What you wrote is precisely the reason I asserted is that all I have are theories. I did not present any statement as fact. Why do you think people become emotionally reactive every time one even asks the question of what are the causes?
I don’t doubt that mental illness is. contributing factor, but I do doubt that it is the only factor. There are lots of mentally ill people in the world. In fact, almost all of us will experience a mental illness at some point in our lifetime.
Do you believe that getting to a root cause or causes would help solve the issue?
@immortal_pirate you have your antisocial traits. Can I use my personal code of ethics to save lives like doctors with birth control and not sell you a gun for sounding like an asshole? Is that covered under religious freedom? It should be. I think too few of these shooters received the help they need or got interventions. Get more people out there diagnosing and make it easier get violent people diagnosed and then you can use your call to prevent guns from getting into the hands of the mentally ill. As it stands I can just go on okcupid and look for a far right hunter profile and steal their weapon if I was some horrible piece of shit that actually wanted to do harm. But for fucks sake I want nothing to do with guns whatsoever and think the world should make it easier to hand in old guns. I just saw a Facebook post asking about hiding a gun in a river after it got old for years of neglect with it for a friend. Definitely not the criminal type. Why not make it easier to hand this shit in. Good samaritan laws. Hand in guns get paid no questions. Thatd get guns off the street. Even few questions if you feel uncomfortable with no questions.
@Squirrel How in the hell can you say that Immortal Pirate is ANTISOCIAL??? You don’t see him at the parties, gatherings, festivals, and visits to friends. You do not see how easily he makes new friends and easily fits into a crowd. Of all the words in the English dictionary, antisocial is the least of the words to describe the man. What you say about him makes no sense. You don’t know him, it is obvious.
I am guessing that the upsurge of games where violence is the theme may have contributed. There are so many games where the objective goal is to kill as many people as you can with different guns. There is an unrealistic side to these games in that after the game is over and all the victims are dead, turning off the game then rebooting it brings all the victims refreshed and living again —- ready to be killed again. It leads weak minds to the unreal idea that killing people is not a bad thing to do. But,real live people don’t reboot, or refresh and come back to life.
Some kids are raised with no discipline and think that they will not be punished. They feel that they are entitled to do whatever they have a whim to do. If they don’t like something, they destroy it.
Then there are people who commit suicide by police shooting. They can’t bring themselves to commit suicide at their own hands, so they commit a crime that is so shockingly awful that the police will shoot them.
@ladybarbara I suspect all of what you mention may be factors contributing to mass shootings. I do think some people glorify and idealize what they see in a video game or even a movie and they sort of lose touch with reality in that way.
I think there are several other things that may be contributing factors, as well. Just curious to see what others think.
@Scarlett2 Both Immortal Pirate and I have worked in the prison systems and talked with the inmates themselves about their crimes, and life. We have seen that there is a sanity factor where the inmate has a lack of mental health. I noticed, when interviewing Death Row inmates that there is a lack of sympathy and a tendency to not think of other human beings as human life. They instead think of other people as “things” that have no worth.
@ladybarbara couldn’t see to reply on mobile til now, check my essay of a reply elsewhere in this thread.
@Scarlett2 I see your point that perhaps some of the shooters idolize other shooters. They want the fame and notoriety. They want their name mentioned, even after their death.
Then again, I once talked face to face with a killer at the prison she was to spend the rest of her life in. She laughed and threw back her head in total gleefulness and said, “Killing is fun!!!” It did not bother her that her actions and her testimony alone sent a man to Death Row, when his DNA was not even found in the murder case. The victims were murdered with her gun and her boyfriends sperm was found on each victim’s body, and when this woman was arrested, she had the clothing and jewelry of the six victims in a box. She handed the box to the police and said that the killer had given it all to her. Meanwhile, that said man was not anywhere near her. His DNA was not at any of the murder scenes, but hers was. She was thrilled that she had such power to be able to get a man sent to Death Row and she had fun killing six women, then laughed when the arresting officer said that he did not think that a woman would commit such murders. She was in prison for killing her boyfriend and hacking his head off, and she was proud of her crimes. She did not see any of her victims as human beings. To her, they were things that had to die so that she could feel the gore and sick glory. This is the kind of insanity that I have had to interview in my work on the Innocence Project. I have seen people with some very sick minds and they all had no empathy and thought of their victims as mere “things”.
When I hear a Social Worker say that these people could be rehabilitated, or saved somehow, I just slap my forehead (facepalm) and sigh. It is just a fact that there is evil in this world. All the therapy and trying to understand them won’t work. The laws can stop them, but all the laws in the world will not make them not want to kill people. Gun laws can be strict, but the bad guys will still find a way to get guns — and kill.
@ladybarbara check my essay of a reply. About to reread this
@ladybarbara I love the innocence project. My exgf used their data for her thesis. More false positive convictions could be overturned if statistics were permitted to suggest reasonable doubts in more cases. Some circumstances allow it, but not enough I think she said.
@ladybarbara what exactly is discipline? A belt? More of my friends treated that way have PTSD and drinking problems and socially maladaptive behavior than don’t. Discipline is forcing your kid to apologize for mistreating others, not harsh punishment. Punishment does nothing without fairness or explanation. The most fucked up man I ever met was also the most fiercely “disciplined”. Part of good discipline is using a carrot and spending quality time to enrich your children’s lives.
@Squirrel Did I say anything about hitting with a belt? A person can be disciplined without using such violence.
As for your opinion that Immortal Pirate not have a gun, he worked as an Officer of the Law and that came with plenty of therapy, testing, background checks, and training. In his job, anytime he needed to use his weapon, it came with paperwork and reports to fill out, then counseling to make sure they knew what was behind the act of using his weapon to break up a riot on the yard and keep the inmates from killing one another.
While I’m not sure how much of it is mental issues, it doesn’t help that people can’t get help unlike other developed countries with better healthcare. Also the amount of guns and the access to those guns. It’s just too easy for bad people to get them. We dug this hole and now we have to lie in it. Well, others dug it and we have to live with it. Curb the access would help. Universal healthcare would help.
@yin I think that mental illness can be a contributing factor. However, I feel like it is a multitude of reasons for these mass shootings. Not sure if racism may one day be classified as a mental illness. I think it may be, one day. I do not think racism is a sole reason for mass shootings, but in some cases it is. In some cases, I believe white privilege and those who are white or male feeling threatened by something in society. I think bullying can be a factor. I think there are many contributors. I agree with you on sane gun laws and healthcare.
@Scarlett2 Just to clarify. I personally question how much mental illness contributes to these kind of things, but I hear so many people bring up the idea that it isn’t the guns and it is mental illness/crazy people. Since we need better healthcare anyway, if we have people who believe it is mental illness, then we should give people good healthcare to check that stuff out. As you said, it is a question though of what actually counts as mental illness. Some people feel that it is anything absurd or “evil” that people do. I’m just not sure that it is that simple. Bullying can be an issue. Websites that allow credible violent conversations should be looked at as well. Overall, guns themselves are the common denominator in all of them. Types of guns, the amount of ammo a magazine holds. Attachments. Power of the gun. Size of the gun. All these things needs to be looked at as well. Some of those things just aren’t needed in our society, like that 100 round drum. It’s absurd.
Simply, more guns, more violence. Studies show very direct correlation with guns and violence. Countries with more guns have more violence. Countries with fewer guns have less violence. And should be added, countries with fewer guns have a lot less violence overall, it’s not like another weapon will compensate.
Many other countries play WAY more video games than the USA (e.g. South Korea, Japan) and they have almost zero mass shootings, so it’s not video games.
Recently, the most popular movies have had overall less gun violence. Compare Endgame to the Matrix. I’m pretty sure there’s been a bit of a reduction in gun violence in movies in the last few decades (talking about the most popular movies, anyway). Talking out of my butt on this one, it’s just a personal observation.
Mental illness has not been proven, and in fact most shooters were NOT diagnosed with mental illness. The “you gotta be crazy to be a white supremacist” doesn’t hold up because thousands of SS guards worked at Auschwitz or conducted mass murders in the name of white supremacy and I highly doubt they were all mentally ill. Neither do we talk about mental illness in the topic of ISIS. You don’t have to be mentally ill to be some kind of fanatic.
Not to mention that MOST mentally ill people are simply a danger to themselves, because they cannot take care of themselves properly. MOST mentally ill people are NOT aggressive, so I wouldn’t give mental illness such a bad name. At least maybe specify – psychopathy? Sociopathy? Narcissism?
So guns and radicalization. There are social media platforms where radical ideologies are parroted, echoed, and magnified. Then these radicalized people, usually young white males, go out and buy a gun to carry out their designs, whether it’s racism, extreme mysoginy (incels), just “being curious” about extreme gun violence and what it’s like to be a mass shooter etc.
@georockstar09 makes sense! I agree with what you write here. In ways it is a dangerous idea that is being circulated by many that it is all due to mental illness. It isn’t really fair to target those with mental illness as most of us will experience mental illness at some point in our lives time. There are also some common misconceptions about mental illness. For example, many think schizophrenics are dangerous when most research shows most are non-violent.
Jesus christ Barbara and pirate nope. Sociopathy is not a common enough mental illness. Is all violence diagnosable as a mental illness? If mental illness is the problem, what steps would you take other than violating your own code of ethics by cutting into the 2nd amendment you care so much about to keep the mentally ill from getting guns?
In my opinion we need better paid social workers and school counselors and a change in parenting from A+s as the goal to socially well adapted behavior and happy healthy kids as the goal. Part of that health is a financial future sure. But there’s a reason gen z is screaming out unheard by boomers about gun violence. It sure as fuck isn’t that the mentally diagnosed are committing these crimes, but that guns are accessible to very young very unstable people who often never received he appropriate diagnoses of psychopathy or an illness resulting from socio structural abuse such as violent parenting or absent family. The problem is anomie and not video games, since they’re scientifically proven to be inert in terms of future violent behavior. Quit glamorizing killing people in war and maybe we’ll start believing killing is never a good thing. Preach ahimsa instead of killing the terrorists. Build schools and health centers to wage war instead of drop bombs. It’s not communist professors like those I saw in college that are promoting violence, it’s the far right and the demagogue in chief stoking the flames. “Charlottesville had some good guys” but as soon as a person of color or a holding a Koran shoots somebody (especially caucasian) we chant lock them up, prevent all immigration from anybody looking remotely like us (don’t forget per capita the UAE is likely richer than us) and get more (white) cops forgiven for breaking the law to go after suspects they just have a (potentially racist) gut feeling about?
If the problem is the mentally I’ll then fix it instead of pointing fingers and dropping a pinch of tiny violin sized sand on a forest fire.
You’ve said it yourself, those that really really want guns will always get them, so clearly the mentally I’ll can get past your suggested idea.
How about we make therapy accessible to everyone and promote an initiative to get more therapists into remote regions of the nation typically poorly covered to promote more healing. Require actual instead of gender pay gap style equal coverage for mental illnesses.
Promote diagnosis at younger ages and destigmatize psychiatric medication. Promote pharmaceutical innovation in the dead psychiatric medication pipeline. Rethink addiction to be just as stigmatized as mental illness and treatable with CBT instead of just unregulated poorly proven 12 step programs that are too one sized fits all to help enough of everyone.
Pirate you’ve got some sociopathy of your own in your callousness to the suffering of others. If I was the government I’d say maybe you shouldn’t buy a gun. What if you could only buy a gun after 3 sessions in free therapy confirming stability? Only approved if you open up and confirm you’re mentally stable and empathetic.
We need more and better trained and more proactive guidance counselors and more incentivization to work with troubled schools. Nobody wants to go to troubled districts because the pay and stress are totally not worth it so teachers become babysitters and guidance counselors can’t even crack the surface.
The military and politics do more to glamorize violence than videogames.
We need more ways to bring young adults together outside of homes and talking about their feelings in a healthy manner and no more of this incel bullshit or America before American immigrants bullshit.
If you’re angry you’re out of work it’s not your neighbor’s fault for having a job, it’s your own or structural and a mismatch of skills to the economy around you. Incentivize relocation and the unemployment and underemployment rates will fall but anomie will rise.
The mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent crimes than perpetrators even if they are at increased likelihood of being perpetrators. Alcohol abuse and symptoms medications can treat are primary factors behind the violence. The fact of the matter is most of these mass shooters are religious extremists and white supremacists who never got diagnosed to be prevented from buying a gun in the first place.
More hugs, fewer hardcore weapons out of regulated militia (aka nat’l guard and police) hands, more pills, less bullshit, more talking to people who are different from you.
No bs I put some of my own cognitive distortions in here for you to challenge with facts rather than opinions as extreme statements to fan the flames and get a conversation, so understand I’m a lot less radical than I’m making myself out as. I’m playing devils advocate making extreme statements to challenge my own views contrasting but not necessarily invalidating yours. And I hope everybody is doing swell.
@Squirrel yes to more therapy, more social workers, emotional and social intelligence in schools etc.
I think we have to be careful about lumping it into a mental health issue, though. The APA came out with a statement yesterday advising that most mentally ill people are not violent. It’s a tough situation because now mentally ill people are getting a bad rap which is an already discriminated against group. However, that does not negate the fact that I believe your ideas are strong ones.
@Scarlett2 the overwhelming majority of the mentally ill are quite peaceful and likelier to be victims than perpetrators of violent crime, albeit a very small minority are violent and it ruins the whole perception. I think it’s the undiagnosed victims of abuse buying into hateful rhetoric and seeing shooters get attention acting out of isolation and pain trying to act out their own white supremacist jihads.
@Squirrel Your opinion is noted. I am not an advocate of violence as you might think, but I am a strong supporter of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If the government, the military, and the police were the only people to have guns we would not be living in a free country.
@Squirrel There is no way to stop the mentally ill from getting guns, or knives, or hatchets, or trucks and fertilizer and chemicals to blow up buildings full of people. You can take all of the guns away from law abiding citizens, making it so that no one can defend themselves, or their family —— and the bad guys will still find a way to get guns, or something to do mass killing. Do you think a stronger police force will protect people? If a bad guy is breaking into your house to kill you, call the police and then call to order a pizza. The pizza will get there before the police will, and the murderer will eat your pizza when it gets there, after killing the delivery guy. By the time the police get there, there will be crusts in a pizza box, the delivery guy is dead, you are dead, your family is dead. —— If you had a gun to defend yourself, you could hold off the bad guy until the pizza and police arrive. The police would handle it from there and everyone gets to live.
@ladybarbara Move to New Jersey and the opposite will be the case. High demand for pizza, high population density means police are always in your face and nearby, lower crime than most other places, less gun violence (because we have fewer guns).
That’s justification for a shotgun, but an AR15 or an ak47? no way. It’s not shotguns massacring so many people most of the time, it’s semiautomatic weapons with high cartridge capacities.
Why are all bad guys mentally ill? Just exactly what mental illness makes people murderers? Bipolar disorder? Hell, most of us are just struggling to make it on our own and want to just be liked again. The mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent crimes than perpetrators.
Get better locks and it’ll help more than having a bigger gun. My point isn’t guns are awful or that you need locks or anything so blunt, but rather guns aren’t the only issue, it’s not simply about mental illness, because most of these scumbags never got diagnosed with jack shit, so don’t blame those of us taking care of our health by taking pills and trying to combat stigma by saying I did crazy shit while I was manic and tried to commit suicide when I was depressed, blame those that refuse to reach out to those isolated fucked up people in corrupt corners of the internet like r/incels and 4chan and the stigma on mental illness that makes these hypothetically but undiagnosed “mentally ill” bastards not seek help.
My point wasn’t that pirate is asocial and doesn’t have friends, my point in saying he has antisocial tendencies was saying he can be mean at times, which is one marker found in psychopathy, aka antisocial personality disorder. I don’t think he’s remotely a psychopath, just somebody who’s a bit stiff and more rigid in his beliefs than I like. He’s a good man.
@ladybarbara you know what corner of the internet I blame? r/the_donald. Calls for genocide happen there racism goes unchecked, toxic masculinity fuels the incel movement, and references to it as a hate group end up pretty credible. legitimizing such a hate group is the problem. I’m not saying the president agrees with them, but I’m saying his failure to condemn them makes him at least somewhat complicit. The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil but by those who stand there and do nothing.
@Squirrel President Trump has said that he DOES condemn the KKK and Nazi groups, and hate groups, but the far left news channels won’t report it. News channels owned by George Soros are dictated to by George Soros. Soros wants our country destroyed from within and he is a puppet master for the leftists ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS stations.
I agree that high powered automatics and semi automatics with high capacity cartridges AR15 and ak47 and the like, are way too much. They should be banned. Even with hunting, a shotgun — 5 shot —is plenty enough. Killing a deer with a machine gun is insane and there is no use for that kind of rapid fire in the city. I agree with you on that.
@ladybarbara @immortal_pirate
you are a delusional old woman living with a senile old man
i hope to hell neither of you drive
@Tits McGee I drive and I own guns.
@Tits McGee
I drive a gun.
@Tits McGee Senile??? Old at 60??? You will one day be 60 and then you can say weather or not 60 is old.
I do drive a car and own a few guns. I live in a right to carry state where we can wear a gun in a holster, on a belt, right in plain sight. I don’t carry my gun in public, even though the laws of the state of Arizona say that it is OK.
@ladybarbara you’re only 60? holy hell i thought you were in your 70s
and yes, WE ALL KNOW THE AZ CARRY LAWS – you mention on every post regarding guns
i only go to AZ to visit relatives, so I will avoid you all
@Tits McGee I never said that I am 60. I am 72, but I have a partner that is in his lower 60s. I do not consider him an old man. He may have gray hair, but many people get gray hair in their 40’s and 50’s. Gray hair does not make a person old. I get real tired of you slamming me and my partner. We are clean and sober folks who don’t have a problem with drugs and booze, or having to go to rehab. Our lives are happy and free of all the shit you have in your life. Our minds are clear of the crap that keeps you the angry person you are. —- For us, life is good.
YOU ARE PATHETIC!!!
non-cultists will say it’s mental illness, but the answer is guns.
just too many
obviously
If you ask me based on Australia’s gun violence rate the problem is we have too many guns per capita. Australia cut back guns and has some of the lowest gun violence rates in the world. They also condone drinking at work iirc.
Absent parents who leave their children to be raised by insane liberals and the state
Fatherlessness
Growing up in a society that is ethically schizophrenic
Take your pick, there’s all kinds of potential causes.
Why do you think mass knifings are so prevalent in China?
Why do you think islamic terrorism is so prevalent in Europe?
Why do you think construction workers committing suicide is so prevalent in the US?
Why do you think fatherlessness is so prevalent in black communities?