Mass shooters are often motivated by essentially suicidal fantasies. They just sometimes decide to take an elementary school class with them. It’s hard to be sympathetic, but then again it highlights how the lack of access to quality health care and mental health care in particular is part of what is rotting our society from the inside out. t seems to me we are lumping unrelated phenomena from a few categories:

• disputes, fights, drug and gang-related activity – like the street shootings in Philadelphia’s South Street recently, but depressingly this happens every day in many cities
• suicidal depression coupled with violence – like most school shootings
• foreign religious/ideological/geopolitical extremism, such as 9/11
• domestic anti-government, sometimes racist extremism, such as the Oklahoma City bombing

The latter two you could maybe lump together, although ironically these groups would consider each other enemies. The first two are completely different though. There are several different problems here with several different solutions.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still too many guns in too many hands and too many people who think more violence is the answer to our violence problem.