What causes mass shootings? If it's motivated purely by the desire to shoot people with cool badass assault rifles, then banning things that look like assault

What causes mass shootings? If it's motivated purely by the desire to shoot people with cool badass assault rifles, then banning things that look like assault rifles would solve it. If it's just the desire to shoot people, then you would have to ban all firearms. However, if it's caused by the desire to kill, with no regard for the mechanism, then banning guns would have no or little effect: they would move to the next-easiest node in the attack tree.[1] If you ban all trucks, then attackers would try to burn down high rises, or poison water mains, or release sarin gas in subway stations, etc etc. The observation that these other attacks are exotic and weird is only weak evidence for to the question if mass shootings are for the shooting, or the killing. --- 1: https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/1999/12/attack_trees.html https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/1999/12/attack_tr...