One man in USA kills 18 and injures many today! No one needs an assault weapon ever, So sad that the USA hasn't outlawed assault weapons!

This fetish for guns as if normal domestic implements to such an extent these killings are common, seems confined to the USA.

I know gun-owning is one the country's most divisive matters. I also know by no means all American households own so much as a pop-gun; yet others like to boast of their arsenals of powerful machines like assault-rifles designed purely to kill people.

I think I am right that there are even more shootings than these wilful ones, some tragically fatal, by accident or negligence. The latter includes occasionally, parents having carelessly left a loaded gun lying about the house, readily accessible to an inquisitive young child.

I know it varies from State to State, but the USA's gun laws seem very loose indeed. In some States it is easier to buy guns and ammunition than beer, in ordinary village shops! A friend bizarrely found he could, despite being a foreigner visiting a region that probably sees few foreign tourists. (He could replace ammunition he'd expended by invitation on his hosts' private range, on their farm, but could not prove being old enough to buy some beer.)
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Is there something in the American psyche that fosters shooting as the answer to all problems? It's certainly a violent society, but so are those of many nations.


Pressed, American gun-lovers often hide behind their mystical interpretation of a Constitutional, pre-Army [i]Amendment[/i]". So it can be [i]Amended[/i] again, even abolished, by national will via the nation's normal parliamentary process, but would need that will. So citing the Constitution simply evades the question "Why?" - do you want a gun, or guns.

Why own a powerful gun? Some, perhaps, by fear: "My neighbour has a pistol and looks a bit odd. I'd better buy a shot-gun." Others imagine some undefined, inexplicable apocalyptic event, even a second civil-war, so stock their homes and remote bolt-holes with food and ammunition. Still others seem merely, ghoulishly attracted to anything that can kill any living thing just because it can kill, and the more powerful, the more attractive. Like buying an enormous all-terrain SUV just to go shopping - except that the car is not intended as a killing tool.

Sites like SW suggest a nasty undercurrent of widespread, domestic, physical and mental cruelty in US society (the modern offence of "coercive and controlling behaviour" in UK law). Though perhaps we hear only from victims or boastful bullies, not about happy relationships, so the level is not possible to gauge; and domestic bullying is a world-wide problem anyway.

We also see SW posts revealing a strange desire to "nuke" any other country for anything. That thinking is as lazy as its slang, but perhaps from an outmoded American belief that you can shoot any country into the American way.

Hollywood, TV and video game companies make vast profits peddling images of extreme death and destruction for entertainment; very controversial, but often thought to numb some viewers' sensibilities and encourage the already-callous.


So although all of those factors may foster widespread callousness, it still does not really answer,

"WHY so many random killings, in public places, schools, work-places etc.; to a far higher level than in any other otherwise-stable country?"

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Very often the murderer is shot at the scene; by Police, some other gun-carrier, or suicide. So unless he (I have not heard of female "mass" killers) has left definite evidence at home, his motive is indeterminable. The motive is unique to the incident but some motives may be common in general ways, such as grudges.

Speculation, and blanket assertions by non-psychologists of the perpetrators' unspecified "mental illness", are pointless; but genuine analysis of left evidence and personal knowledge, may at least help explain the incident. Better still, if such shooters are also caught alive, and made to account for their actions personally, perhaps it may be easier to find just what are the common causes of the so many needless deaths .


Something must be there in US society to harbour a uniquely-American problem only Americans themselves can address; but [i]as well as[/i] unthinking gun-fetishism, what?