Mass shootings and gun control laws.

The mass shootings in Thailand are a true tragedy and for once, I'm surprised to see news of a mass shooting that didn't happen in the US - not that this should be any consolidation whatsoever. However, every time there's a mass shooting, you can count on the same predictable responses from people who think they know the answers to everything, even when the answers are far from clear. I mean just take a look at the debate back home in the US...

Democrats always call for stronger gun control laws. "We need to ban assault rifles." Well I have some good news for you! Assault rifles are already illegal under federal law, like all weapons capable of fully automatic fire. What politicians actually want is a ban on "assault weapons," which is a nonsense category. An "assault weapon" is just a normal rifle that has various accessories, like foregrips and barrel shrouds and flash suppressors, which don't actually increase the killing power of a weapon but make it look scary. Banning them will do nothing to prevent mass shootings, all it would do is make voters feel like they're safer and thank their Congressional representatives for finally Doing Something.

Oh, and background checks? I'm not opposed to them, but let's look at the facts here: Most of these mass shooters passed the damn background checks! These people aren't hardened ex-cons with long criminal records, they're mostly just angry misanthropic losers. "Then we need better background checks!" Better how? What exactly do you think could be done here? Implement a Pre-Crime detection system like in Minority Report?

Then there are the people who blame "mental illness." Quite frankly, this does nothing but stigmatize people with psychological disorders. It can also be used to justify taking away their rights - for instance, preventing them from owning firearms, or even institutionalizing them against their will. Roughly 20-25% of people suffer from some kind of mental illness, and the overwhelming majority of them are non-violent. Only a small minority of mentally ill people are a threat to anyone, and most of those people are only a threat to themselves, not others. "We should've done a better job of catching these people ahead of time." How, exactly? Most of these shooters were considered to be perfectly sane and sound before they went on their killing sprees. Psychologists don't have telepathy, and even if they did suspect something, what could they do about it? Have someone institutionalized for being creepy or vaguely suspicious?

There's also a lot of people - mostly social conservatives, but also a good number of suburban boomer Democrats - who blame violent movies and video games. This ridiculous idea should've died out in the 90s, since studies have continually proven that violent media has little to no correlation with violent actions, but somehow it stuck around and keeps getting dredged up every time a new Bad Thing happens. Most recently, Trump has jumped on the "iT's aLL bEcAuSe oF viDeO gAmeZ" bandwagon, likely just as a scapegoat to draw attention away from the fact that his own toxic ideology motivated the El Paso shooter.

If video-games were a major contributor to violence, then the nations that spend the most (per capita) on video games would show a marked tendency towards higher rates of violence.

Video games as a driver of violence would then show up on the chart above, but no such effect exists.

Finally, there's no shortage of liberals and leftists making comments along the lines of "can you believe how awful white men are?," which is maximally unhelpful. I get the point - White Nationalism is a toxic and corrosive influence on society, and while it may not be responsible for all spree killings, it's the driving ideology behind most of the politically-motivated ones - but "lol fuck white dudes" is the absolute worst way of expressing that point. That just reinforces the idiotic right-wing narrative that liberals are "reverse racists" who have a problem with White men simply for being White men. It's also statistically inaccurate, at least in terms of race, since White people are actually underrepresented among mass shooters; 56% of mass shooters are White, despite Whites comprising 73% of the population. (That said, the "angry young White man" stereotype is statistically accurate when it comes to gender; mass shooters are overwhelmingly male, to the point where virtually 100% of them are committed by men.)

So, who or what do we blame for spree killings, and what can we do about it? I don't know. I don't have any answers here. I don't know if there is a right answer. I just know a wrong one when I see it, and there are a lot of wrong answers out there.