> There is one developed country—and only one—in which it is not only legal, but easy and convenient, to amass a private arsenal of mass slaughter. That country also happens to be the one—and the only one—regularly afflicted by mass slaughters perpetrated by aggrieved individuals.

> You would not think that this is a complicated problem to puzzle out. Yet even as the casualties from gunfire mount, Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers.

* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/guns-are-a...

A similar column from a few years ago:

> A village has been built in the deepest gully of a floodplain.

> At regular intervals, flash floods wipe away houses, killing all inside. Less dramatic—but more lethal—is the steady toll as individual villagers slip and drown in the marshes around them.

> After especially deadly events, the villagers solemnly discuss what they might do to protect themselves. Perhaps they might raise their homes on stilts? But a powerful faction among the villagers is always at hand to explain why these ideas won’t work. “No law can keep our village safe! The answer is that our people must learn to be better swimmers - and oh by the way, you said ‘stilts’ when the proper term is ‘piles,’ so why should anybody listen to you?”

* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-rea...

So it's not just easy access to guns. It's the surrounding culture of gun play, gun heroism, gun rhetoric, gun rights, gun "freedom", gun permissiveness, guns-make-you-a-real-person-who-matters - and so on.

Other countries don't have anything like the same culture to anything like the same extent. Which is why you can have equivalent levels of gun ownership without the same problems.

Well let's look at just the United States, over time, rather than the US compared to other countries. In the US, a proliferation of firearms has been a constant throughout our history. But it is only recently (really starting with Columbine) that we've had REGULAR outbursts, almost always by men under 30. I would hypothesize that the elephants in the room are a)prescription psychotropic drugs and their side-effects b)constant negative media about males/toxic masculinity c)overall ineffective child-rearing practices and extended adolescence, some of which stems from a reduction in two-parent households.

These are vague partly because so few people will take a deep dive into these subjects when so much money flows from these influences (pharmaceuticals, media, etc...).

But why aren't we looking at the variables, instead of the constant?

>>>it is absolutely progress to have mass murderers be forced to utilize something like a knife than head on down the street and pick up an automatic/semi-automatic weapon.

1. You can't "head on down the street" and pick up an automatic weapon in the US. You need a Federal Firearms License for that. And historically, FFL holders are some of the most law-abiding citizens in the country. Even if there were a ban on semi-auto weapons, the market would adapt. I've already brainstormed on how to optimize a bolt-action rifle for rapid, sustained fire and I'm not even a firearms designer.

2. Tightening the gun proliferation sounds great...in theory. How do you actually accomplish it in practice? There are 300 million+ firearms spread across the country in about 40% of households. This is a land area greater than that occupied by the Germans on the Eastern Front, with a greater number of potential "partisans", and the Germans never even came CLOSE to securing their rear areas. That anyone expects widespread gun confiscations to NOT turn into a bloodbath is naive IMO, and if the objective is saving lives than it would also be counter-productive.

3. Maybe the mass murders will switch to homemade explosives instead of knives, which would be a significantly WORSE outcome? Ever think of that? Maybe they'll get guidance from jihadis. Hell, explosives already gave us one of the worst school massacres in American history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

But for anything serious like terrorist attacks, it won't make much of a difference. Guns come in through criminal networks anyway (as in Europe). Norway has gun control laws, yet Breivik was still able to kill nearly 80 people regardless. Vehicles have proven to be decent weapons to kill many people with. 9/11 used airplanes and improvised knives to kill thousands.

Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop.

Then why are you doing it? Don't reply to me though, HN isn't the place to discuss it.

>The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths

The latter does nothing to refute the former. The first is claiming gun control can reduces deaths by gun, but only by shifting deaths to a different category. The latter claims that in the category of people dying by gun, number of guns and deaths is correlated.

Well, not exactly: https://twitter.com/mark_j_perry/status/672946028706996224

Personally I think there is a link in A-moral violent video games as well as violent music that glorifies killing. Now in saying that please don't construe it with me being an advocate for censorship. I am not, but I think there is a link.

Further if you couple that with young males who have little prospects in this brave new world, fresh out of school or getting ready to graduate, no real direction and probably a hand full of romantic rejections due to being awkward you have a powder keg waiting to happen.

Funny enough in the case of the Texas shooter, after reading his manifesto, I was surprised he did not use explosives. His reasoning where more like Timothy Mcveigh's than many of the other shooters. He does not fit the typical profile.

I think the quarantine is for information in this case. Instead of breathless, stop-the-world coverage of these events, treat them like traffic accidents: “22 people were murdered by a white supremacist terrorist in an El Paso Wal-Mart this afternoon. Now here’s Bob with the weather.”

Gun buyback programs are 1 kind of medicine. Some people won’t take it, but we should try. Maybe we can institute some kind of guns-for-Medicare program (only sorta joking).

Gun control legislation is the inoculation. I don’t think we can get to full-on prohibition in the US without repealing the 2nd amendment, but we can implement licensing and registration requirements and longer waiting periods.

We also need to improve the existing systems. The ATF has a “gun registry”, but it’s not a searchable database. See https://www.thetrace.org/2016/08/atf-non-searchable-database...

I think it isn't absurd today that poor mental health, social isolation, and digital media consumption is making certain segments of the population more likely to violently lash out, and for the countries which afford these people easy access to firearms, the cost will be orders of magnitude higher.

Even if you don't accept easy access to firearms as the root cause, it's definitely a factor. You don't kill 21 people with rocks and sticks.

So yes, let's all sit on our hands say there's nothing we can do and now isn't the right time to have this discussion and wonder why these tragedies continue to happen.