• A collapse of American industry
• People being financially wiped out
• The opiod epidemic
• A general culture of greed and personal enrichment at all costs
• The ever increasing transfer of wealth to the top

Australian here. We had one really bad mass shooting and then our government (who was also one of the most conservative governments in the last 50 years) banned guns. Haven't had one since. Guns just aren't a thing here and we kind of think you're a weird country for being so obsessed with guns. I also personally think it's weird that guns are like the symbol of your freedom, yet you don't have universal healthcare. Universal healthcare offers so much more freedom than guns do.

In saying that a lot of countries have guns and don't have the same problem with mass shootings. What the US has is a cultural problem in terms of your relationship with guns and violence. Unfortunately, doing a mass shooting is now a normalised way to deal with your problems. Not all of you, obviously. But enough of you that it's gotten completely out of control. In Australia I don't think it was just the banning of guns that has reduced mass shootings. We have a culture in Australia of 'don't be a dickhead'. I think when we had our mass shooting we all collectively just said yeah nah mass shootings are next level dickhead behaviour.

Media coverage becoming a compounding factor.

There weren't many school shootings, and suddenly Columbine happened.

The thing is - Columbine wasn't really a school shooting.

It was a failed bombing. The shooting was to get everyone into the cafeteria where they'd set up barrel bombs which luckily didn't go off. In fact, the largest casualty attack in a US school remains a bombing from 1927.

As a school shooting, Columbine was also quite atypical, with two perpetrators.

But as soon as you now had what was really a failed bombing being covered by the news as a school shooting, suddenly thereafter were a ton of school shootings (that fit the normal archetype of a mass shooting with a lone perpetrator).

And each of those got a ton of coverage and the numbers of mass shootings went up yet again.

If you suddenly prohibited covering mass shootings in media (impossible because of the 1st amendment, but hypothetically), I am certain you'd see mass shootings drop by double digit numbers.

The fact that Columbine was so atypical of what events followed in its planning but was so close to what followed in how it was covered in the news tells a pretty damning story of the role of mass media in this phenomenon.

Also see:

Towers, S., Gomez-Lievano, A. Khan, M., et al. (2015). Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings. PLOS One. 10(7): e0117259. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117259

Lankford, A and Tomek, S. (2017). Mass Killings in the United States from 2006 to 2013: Social Contagion or Random Clusters. The American Association of Suicidology. doi: 10.1111/sltb.12366

A weird fetish for guns and a completely unregulated gun lobby.

In Switzerland every male between 18 and 40 that hasn’t actively decided against it, has an assault riffle under their bed (for some that’s meant literally…). Althoughwe don’t let them have ammunition as well.

Anyway, you can buy guns here and people do. It’s just not that we think we need them to defend ourselves against the government (which judging by the power of the us military is totally ridiculous anyway). We also don’t allow you to carry it around, let alone loaded ones.

America is a ridiculous cesspool of stupidity, missed educational opportunities and weird, culty patriotism that guns are somehow a part of. The internet made it easier tk spread this and so conservatives have been more successful in spreading their crap around.

Shrinking middle class and people in an endless hopeless pointless life of stress and struggle. Over half the USA can't read at a 6th grade level. Ignorance and stupidity are the primary leverage force used as a political power base. It is a negative feedback loop. Billionaires are a measure of effective democracy in the USA. Their wealth comes from the lack of laws and how they exploit loopholes. They in turn fund politicians that use misinformation and stupidity to maintain the laws at an inadequate level. No one intelligent would vote for these politician and therefore they thrive on a campaign of misinformation and strive to enact policies that keep the population malleable to misinformation. All one has to do is look for where the dumbest, poorest people are located and the lines are clearly seen. These areas are undereducated with poor opportunities because of their leaders who only work for the billionaire oligarchy at the expense of those the directly represent and everyone else they drag down with them. There are no honest billionaires on this planet.

When I visited the USA, I was shocked at the number of clearly not sane people that were wandering the streets, shouting at things only they could see in their minds, etc.

Those are just the visibly mentally ill people, a vast number of others go under the radar.

In my country I've seen people like this maybe twice in my entire lifetime, in the USA I saw a dozen over a 6 month period. It was WILD. It's something you should expect to almost never see in your lifetime, if you're seeing it with any regularity? - There's something very wrong.

These people need to be in mental healthcare, be it a mental hospital for those in most serious condition, or varying levels of care and assistance further down.

But... They don't have a functioning healthcare system in the USA, let alone mental healthcare. All they have really are private companies acting like vultures picking at the dying masses pulling cash and misery out of them.

They're the richest failed state I've ever seen. The wide dissonance between their existence as a functioning first world nation and their existence as a state with a deeply crumbling failed interior that's only further falling apart year after year is kinda wild.

I really hope they can have a bit of cultural and societal revolution and right the ship, there are so many wonderful people there and so much to fight for.

But I think for all their supposed cultural love of fighting for their rights and freedoms, they're just too oppressed by the rich and the powerful to organise and fight for a better nation :-(

Cult of fame coupled with crippling hopelessness caused by late stage capitalism.

Meanwhile, before mass shootings, murder was a lot more common and society was more prone to violence.

Violence has been in a downwards spiral, regardless what is pushed to public forum.

Fox News was founded October 7th 1996, just over 27 calendar yesrs ago. Remember when all the racists were emboldened by Trump being elected, Imagine the slow and steady change after giving them their own justification media machine that spreads FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) for profit of everyone who pays them including weapons manufactureres.

Hyper-sensationalism of the violence and its impact gave those seeking revenge and suicide a convenient two-in-one option.

Modern societies crush people. It breaks them. There are huge contradictions too: the idea of working to succeed when it is actually not working. The idea of freedom vs the wage slavery. The idea of being in a powerful and advanced country but still poor as fuck.

And then you have this culture of guns and violence. They go togethet: you get guns because you believe it can fix problems. Because you believe that killing people can fix problems.

Add 2 and 2 together: you have these life crushing problems, and guns as problem solver. Society provoque the problem. Kill them. Kill them all. Maybe they'll understand after that and change something.

Far right and conspiracy theory give a theoric foundation for people to focus their rage or despair too.

Columbine.

The media went absolutely batshit. Who were they? Why did they do it? Interview absolutely everyone! The public must know. And they tuned in in their droves to find out.

Incel types took note. If you've failed at life and want five minutes of fame, grab a gun and head back to school.

We haven't had AR15s for 200 years. The real answer though is more likely cultural, because there are plenty of countries with permissive gun laws who have much lower rates of gun homicide than the US.

The lack of mental health care for literally everyone.

Misdirection of values. We tell children there's a path, go to school, get a job, find a spouse, get married, get a house and have kids, but life isn't that simple. As life introduces chaos into the path, people fall off and some have a hard time getting back on. We've spent so much time on developing social media and marketing platforms that idolize those that make it through the path that no one looks out for those that fall off, making them feel isolated and unheard. Niche social media and mass marketing for weapons has made it easy for lone wolves to seek revenge on the system that let them down.

I think we can generally say the above is true across all political spectrums. The below might be rejected, but it's my view.

The right has made increasingly extreme statements to pull in these vulnerable people in order to make them feel heard, but it's just for show and votes. We've seen how politicians like Trump are really just using them for his own gains and as the NRA funnels more money into the "system", it really takes huge government action to curb this cycle.

I would blame this, and a lot of the problems "western" countries face, on the proliferation of 24 hour cable news networks since the Gulf War.

Reporting and tracking. Before the automatic weapons ban you had prolific bank robbers that shot their way out of many situations, but it wasn't generalized to mass shootings.

Rico was created to combat organized crime in the 70s. Lots of people were killed, but it was presented as an organized crime problem not a mass shooting problem.

Since Columbine you have school shootings. One of the biggest predictors has become media reporting of a shooting. That's obviously not the sole cause though.

Essentially the US has always been violent, it just hasn't always been lumped into a single mass shootings bucket. Rival gangs fighting is totally different than a school shooter, and a murder suicide is also entirely different.

A lot has been said already, but it's worth mentioning that modern guns are much more capable of killing than guns 200 years ago. Back then, guns were very inaccurate and had to be reloaded one shot at a time and packed by hand. Now we have automatic weapons with large magazines that can be swapped out in seconds. They have less recoil and greater accuracy. Regardless of cultural and political issues, guns are just more capable of killing than they used to be.

50 years ago you could shock the city, maybe the country. Now you can livestream it for the whole world and media makes a huge profit from these incidents I bet. So in short; attention. If you're nobody and want everyone to know your name tomorrow - this is the way.

My theory: In the last 30 years, the topic "gun ownership" has been politicized. Which in turn brought in people who mix up "enjoying freedom" with "being able to own a gun, the bigger, the better". Those people are part of an extreme end of a political spectrum. And guess what you also find at extreme ends of the political spectrum? People who want to cover up their insecurities, people with mental problems, people with extremist worldviews.

The political usurpation of the 2nd amendment by the right just to get a strong=fanatical voter base basically led to this rise in gun violence in the USA. Gun ownership as an "expression of freedom" is an artificial construct to harvest votes, just like "fear of immigration" (or worse: "replacement theory" bullshit) or abortion are artificial topics for the same reason. Although the abortion topic has the additional "benefit" of being a part of "suppressing women", which also appeals to certain voter bases.

Fox News was founded in 1996.

The columbine shooting was in 1999.

Maye it isn't guns or mental health but fame.

There are some really good answers here.

I’ll add some additional things.

The repeal of the fairness doctrine, tv news no longer needs to be actually fair.

Back until the mid 80s there were really only 3-4 channels… everyone relied on the same news and we HAD to agree on facts. But there are almost no common facts today. There are 10000 sources and no matter where you are it can look like you’re correct, and very much in the center, and you can’t understand why those crazy “others” can’t see the truth.

how the hell are you going to shoot a big bunch of people with a musket?

The US defunded mental health hospitals.

Our society is rotting

Financial stress. Go take a closer look at the crime stats that right wing racists like to hammer the black community with. Then adjust them for poverty rates in the community. All of a sudden the racial divide in violent crime goes away. If anything, poor white men are the most violent, but not by enough to really be significant. The driving factor, by around 10 or 15 to 1, is poverty.

We're seeing declining standards of living across the country, while technology hides the true depths of it. The whole, you can't be poor if you have a wide screen TV and a refrigerator, is almost true. It's just enough to make it look like having no bargaining power, being locked into your zip code, buried in debt, and renting everything you own, somehow represents wealth.

This is not to say economic desperation alone is the cause of gun violence, but easy access to guns, the complete disdain for funding healthcare mental or otherwise, the lack of vacation for most workers, these are all things which don't make well people.

If we're setting the calendar back 200 years, I'd have to guess that one of the contributing factors is records keeping and reporting. The definition of what is considered a "mass shooting" has also been fluid over the past 50 or so years.

These are not likely to be major contributors, but from Hollywood's depictions, mass shootings may have been pretty common around 150 years ago.

As society has gotten more dense people feel like society has pushed them aside, which it often does. Their families have increasingly less time for their loved ones and dont provide a fallback network.

Bombarded with the lives of the rich and famous which we will never be... might as well be infamous.

Bush let the Clinton assault weapon ban expire and then assault weapons began to flood the market over the next two decades.

Conservative media probably has a lot of blood on its hands. Pumping people up with fear of outsiders. Fox news is a relatively new entity.

I think at the high level it's the military industrial senatorial complex, the deregulation and reagonomics under Republicans, the neoliberalism under democratic, globalization, de-industrialization, the modern banking/credit system, the modern media complex, and personalized engagement algorithms.. Downstream of that is a high rate of poverty, debt, illiquidity, a poor healthcare system, reliance on jobs for affordable healthcare, a lack of access to robust mental health treatment, modernization of weaponry, a radicalized and angry society, collapsing social cohesion, division along small tribal lines, lacl of patriotism, and upregulation of the average amygdala. Downstream of that you have homelessness, addiction, mental health crisises, violence, suicide, murder, and the institutional inertia that makes these intergenerational problems.

Yes, we need a multifactorial approach to all of these things both acute and chronic. It isn't as simple or as possible to get rid of the guns, but we can increase gun laws. We could require training of all citizens, we can give a budget to support red flag law enforcement, we can give the alcohol and tobacco regulation to the FDA, and let at the ATF focus on firearm enforcement, or roll it in to the secret service or fbim We can make healthcare free. We can spend a fuckton of money on it. We can raise the minimum wage. We can actually govern the economic policy rather than outsourcing it to the Fed, and focus on demand-side instead of supply -side economic solutions, pay for college, guarantee a living wage and housing.

But not with most of the Republicans in the way and the lobbyists at the ear of our representatives.

We need a modern Robespierre. A charismatic leader to lead the public by uniting them rather than dividing them, who will make such massive changes that they'll come for his head.

It's probably a combination of many factors already mentioned. If like to add to it the idea that our food supply has changed.

Too many people, too much news, a society that is both more permissive and more polarized, more communication between fringe group members.

I would say publicly and easily available high rate of fire guns were not always in your wallmart shopping lists no ?

The complete unwinding of social safety nets, mental health interventions, and educational funding from the Reagan years finally culminated in a completely vulnerable population. Then we began the era of 24 hour news, extremist Identity politics, and just a general erosion of any semblance of shared American identity.

That's a nasty little stew.

Well for one we redefined mass shooting a few years back which absolutely spiked the numbers because now any robbery gone wrong or gang turf war gets classified in as a MS.

So when people see 300 MS they think 300 columbines or 300 Aurora theatre shootings. Most of those are much smaller and have nothing to do with the lone wolf shooter that people think of when the words "mass shooting" come up.

The other reason is cultural significance. There's an increased likelihood of a shooting in a place where a previous mass shooting has occurred. The media spending weeks covering the incidents while plastering people's likeness all over the place shows the disenfranchised extremist that they too can become infamous in a blaze of glory which leads to increased incidents of mass shooting as well.

Lastly, I think there's a general air of "there's no hope and I have no purpose" among people today that previous generations never had to deal with in the same manner. Add that on top of the previously mentioned things and it multiplies.

So basically media coverage and the sociopolitical divide becoming more of a chasm. Access to firearms hasn't changed much in that time and firearms technology had semi automatic weapons invented for much longer than that.

Maybe don't give guns to mentally unstable people.

@dope Once a meme hits mainstream consciousness it is tough to get it to go away. Columbine out school shootings in the mind of every child of that generation, and since then toxic online forums filled with trolls have kept the idea alive be it "an hero" "unalive yourself" and just generally the nihilistic attitude of if you feel bade enough about yourself to consider killing yourself, you might as well take out some others you hate with you. This is mental illness at its core, but with the enablement of technology and toxic online "community" culture.

Then there are spin off effects of this mentality combined with the impression of the efficacy of terrorism from a psychological imprint perspective, and some narcissists will mass kill for "the cause". Again mental illness at its core, with a different "community" dynamic.

In both of these cases it is the meme, in the original sociology sense of the word, that has caused the rise of the behavior. The cultural condition of alienation and anonymous communication on the rise, combined with overall eroded access to in-person and in-patient mental health services due to the privatized health system, keeps the meme breeding in the alienated cultural class.

One variable that I think doesn't get looked at seriously is class size and school funding. Ask any North American teacher, and you'll get a grim assessment on the trajectory of schooling since the 90's. When teachers have more students than they can handle, it's no surprise that things get out of hand.

I'd argue that part of the solution is more teachers per student. This enables better relationships between faculty and students, and better opportunities for mentorship. Build more schools, hire more teachers, pay them well, make school a place where teachers want to be, and where kids can thrive.

But reforming the existing system is a hot potato that neither the left nor right wants to hold, so, here we are. The system itself is degraded to the point that it doesn't have the resources to self-correct. We need vision, wisdom, funding, and leadership, to steer things in a new direction. I think that would go a long way in preventing a misguided kid from fermenting the idea that murdering people, or their own classmates, is an answer to their problems.

I don't mean to paint school shootings as simply a rebellion against a malfunctioning system, but, we really need to look at the system and make sure it's serving the students that have no choice but to be there.

Being easier to access high capacity and/or higher rate of fire weapons

A lack of support causing more people to experience mental health issues

Suburbanization and urban sprawl causing people to feel more isolated

24/7 need channels filling people's heads with bullshit?

Just a few ideas.

I love how all the people talking about how semi auto guns have been around for X years and blah blah blah completely ignore the massive uptick in production, sale, and distribution of those guns in the past 30-40 (or so).

People have more or less been able to buy assault style semi auto rifles for a long time, but they only "recently" (I guess 30-40 years might not be so recent?) started actually buying them in large numbers. Mostly thanks to the NRA, if I had to point a finger.

The problem is that a really angry or disturbed or whatever person with access to a high rate of fire weapon and lots of ammo (because they've been told that next election Jack Johnson or John Jackson will be taking their guns) can literally just pick it up and go kill half a dozen or more people in 30 minutes. There's nothing we can do to intercept that. (And "good guys with guns" have a terrible track record, including cops.)

We even had a little experiment in the 90s where people were buying a lot of these and then we banned them. Mas shootings (4+ victims according to the FBI if I recall correctly) had been going up but then they went down until ...

W and his Republican stooges (or maybe he was the stooge?) let the ban expire, mass shootings started ticking up.

The drivers that lead people to mass violence probably are the "root" of the problem, and I would guess hypothetically that if we could snap our fingers and solve those it wouldn't matter how many or what type of guns there are out there. The problem is that we aren't even trying to fix those problems, and the Republican Party is actively making them worse, AND we're making these literal weapons of war easily available to everyone.

Semi-automatic guns became widespread in the US military in World War II. The US’s first mass shooting was in 1949, by a man who served in WWII.

Mass shootings were common before 30 years ago, but generally only gangsters had automatic weapons, so the non-gang/mafia related mass shootings usually only involved revolvers or shotguns and were over pretty quickly.

WBUR actually did a podcast on this recently.. It's called the Gun Problem iirc

The Internet and modern media. We're constantly blasted with stuff that makes us feel shitty because we don't have this or that, but someone else does, or companies are telling you that no one will like you if you don't buy their product.

Before the internet, everyone's lives weren't on display for the whole world to see and the only people you had to compare yourself to were those in your community.

Total speculation from my own experience... so maybe just me.

It seems like there is just a completely different culture surrounding guns that didn't exist before (or just wasn't so damn loud). I'm talking about the whole I need guns for "protection" because crime is out of control, the 2nd amendment SHALL NOT be infringed, "don't tread on me," I have guns and I'd like to see the government "try" and take them, etc. It's like this delusional, childish owning a gun so you can tell people you own a gun... thing? Anyone else notice you can always tell who owns a gun by how dumb their bumper stickers are?

I talked to an older dude who went to my high school 20 years before me and he told me how him and a buddy often brought their rifles to school. It was never a "thing." They might have gone hunting before school or something.. I forget. But the whole attitude he had about it was the polar opposite of what it has become.

No one is coming for your guns guys. On that note, no one fucking cares either.

America's greatest export is war. we're a very violent nation. every generation since the founding has had a major conflict to attend - but most of our wars in the last 30 years or so havent involved a lot of "boots on the ground". that pent up rage requires an outlet. mass killings/shootings/etc are a direct result.

adding to that, handguns are very easy to obtain - you can legally purchase them easily enough but there's also a very active black market where cash is king and questions are not asked, backgrounds are not checked. since Americans are legally permitted to own/carry firearms (as enshrined in our founding governmental documents), the system cannot change. it's not politically acceptable to request a change. no career politician is going to burn their entire life's work in something that is destined to fail. even considering is is borderline insane.

dont expect things to magically get better.

I want to say District of Columbia v Heller had something to do with it, but Columbine was a decade prior.

In the US, easy access to modern weapons mixed with increasing mental health issues is a toxic combo.

We've had guns for 200 years but not ones capable of mass shootings. Semiautomatics only became widely available more recently, and most countries have since banned them from casual use but not the USA

Mass shootings are not a recent thing, it started in 1966.

The prevalence of semi auto guns with quick changing magazines.

Part of the problem is also the silly definition of “mass” shooting as any event witnessed by at least four people.