Pix Wrote:This is what I can't figure out (though I have many guesses). There was a time when it was much easier to get a gun, including Tommy guns, but so few mass shootings (the deadliest school massacre in the US wasn't even done with a gun), even in times of hardship. ETA: also worth noting is that violence in general has been going down since the early 1990s, while the number of mass shootings have skyrocketed.
there is a speculation on this -- and it is just that, a speculation -- that men in our time and cultural environment have much less opportunities for the expression of their more violent impulses. it goes along the lines that in past times people did live in constant war, more or less, and in societies that held masculine violence in a much higher regard than our contemporary society does.
this creates a certain vacuum where certain innate impulses get suppressed and denied. our society publicly condemns violence of any kind now. even a mere look at a certain person might get called sexual harassment, and there are more such minor examples. so, given a long-term suppression of this kind, some men do actually explode in violence. but i also am of the opinion that such suppression is at least partly in the individual as it is in the environment. most men do find an outlet to their physical energy without becoming murderers, they find a way to come to terms with it and balance it out in their life. but some seem to not be able to handle it.
of course, there is a difference between different violent acts. the pilot who deliberately crashed his Airbus into the Alps with 200 other people on board was a bit of a different case than this guy who went to shoot homosexual men in a gay night club. terrorism itself is an organized violence with an ideology to it, also a bit different.
why some men can't control themselves while most others (though they, too, might have a difficult time) readily do, is a distinction that should be looked into.
again, this is all a speculation, but an interesting one with some thought-provoking implications on our cultural environment. masculinity itself has been redefined in our time, maybe away from that primitive one, and there are many additional caveats to that as well. you can't really steer human nature too far off the course that is ingrained in it physically. to think that's possible, is an illusion. so, in some areas of life, men are now living very differently from how they were living in the past. all this bears on this topic.