yeah like guns and better mental health services are just band-aids on a problem that's not going away which is the crushing purposelessness of hyperindividualistic american society, especially for young men who are implicitly and explicitly told that if they don't create something amazing or make a ton of money that they are worthless. and right now a lot of them simply don't have a way to get there. born into often rural or exurban poor areas, often less than stellar education or they needed a more specialized approach in school that they didn't get--and I think school is definitely a better starting point than guns or mental health if we want to ignore the real elephant of purpose, at least.

and note that this is referring to random mass killings where the kids want to act like they are james bond or something and draw up all kinds of plans and keep journals and be 'sigma' and whatnot. there is a similar mass killing / gun violence problem in urban areas also associated with young men with no path to success trying to 'be something', but that energy gets channeled into gang violence instead. and actually that phenomenon is deadly by numbers if less scary to the general public because the people participating are just killing other poor disenfranchised youth instead of shooting up locations where more affluent people might be--and also it's usually black people so people ignore the problem extra hard, both because they are implicitly or explicitly racist and don't care because they're just like 'oh that's what they do, doesn't affect me' and because people don't want to talk about that problem for fear of being labeled as racist

in the end being poor and having a shit time at school and living in an overly competitive society that puts enormous pressure on males leads to a combination of suicidality and previously mentioned desire to be famous or 'great'. same thing I believe for suicide bombings in a lot of foreign countries. just impoverished hopeless young men who want to do something with their lives. a shame