Personally I think it's a bona fide societal mental health problem. The American ideal of hyper-individualist self-reliance implies you are utterly on your own.

Personally I think it's a bona fide societal mental health problem. The American ideal of hyper-individualist self-reliance implies you are utterly on your own. This means that everything that happens to you is your fault, and you can only right it by taking responsibility to fix it yourself. But it's kind of impossible to simply stop yourself from being bullied, because "if you could have, you would have". Coupled with entertainment that primarily revolves around people aiming guns at each other while barking orders, then shooting to see who gets to be in charge, then more aiming/barking. Guns are framed as the obvious solution to problems, and the media reinforces this by making sure every shooter gets their 15 minutes (or days). Frankly with this setup, the surprising thing is that there aren't more mass shootings.