My rental home once was robbed, and I wasn't there.
I called the police they made a report
I went to all the pawn shops/thrift stores I could.
Found my stuff, called the cops, and they confiscated the items. Idiots used it as in store credit and bought the rest of something with a credit card. Cops traced the credit cards, got the rest of the stuff of me and my roommates. Everything smelled like cigarettes and we appealed to the prosecutor which stuff was 'damaged' from the heavy smell of cigarettes.
Got restitution. They're probably just getting out of jail now.
Moral of the story, they were just some 18-21 year old idiots with no money or proper education or stable family, I didn't need a gun to 'protect myself' from these idiots.
Most criminals aren't boogeymen, especially those you don't know, and the ones who are, especially those you would know, you'll be too late to stop. Most guns are protection against the psychotic criminals, and that's just something you will be unprepared for and will never happen in your lifetime.
I'm not against gun possession, or even regulating ones for hunting, just strict screening for assault weapons.
Another moral of the story, anecdotal personal experience against an argument doesn't make an argument invalid. Because here's mine.
My theory about mass-shooters is it's a cry for glory/attention/recognition that they don't get in their community/family/school. They're probably mediocre or smart-ish students who have no direction because their parents either don't give a shit or they're in some nowhere town they don't like to be or they're bullied at school or they feel like they can't prove their individualism. How ironic though, that they emulate or copycat mass shooters of the past in order to achieve this glory/attention/recognition and individualism.
The media demonizes them, shows pictures of them, creates night-time specials about the heinous crimes of the century, take pictures of them in court like they're PUBLIC ENEMY No. 1!, etc. They want to be this anti-hero, and they don't have empathy for the victims because they see them as sub-human, or just number to meet this goal.
Again, where are these mass-shooters usually at? late-teenage years - young adult males, from some suburb with hardly any communal spirit, ostracized at school, and/or hard home life.
The guns are a means, as I said, to all this madness. It's a formula and not all the ingredients are needed, but if you start taking away some of them maybe the madness will stop.
What else might change this trend?
-More walkable cities. Americans should design less cities around the car, so that people will bump into each other more often. Kids will have experience with more people than at the home and therefore develop more empathy/more open mindedness. Land and buildings is thrown around, re-zoned, re-purposed, and demolished without any other thought than money. Nobody gets together to think, hey, maybe building that second Super Walmart combination Sam's Club next to a Costco and Super-Target isn't such a good idea. But all the extra sales taxes! All the property taxes! All the land-sale! All the "jobs"! All the convenience! The city let a developer pave over acres of land for parking, the store, the local distribution warehouses, and all the while the neighborhood next to the retail monstrosities have a whole section of walk-ability is cut from them. Streets flock with cars to this new retail hole creating more hesitation from parents to let their kids out for safety reasons. Local-businesses, smaller retailers, etc. can't compete so they close down at places that were once walkable elsewhere. Eventually you have a dry city made entirely out of 4-6 lane roads with walled neighborhoods at one section, retail and parking lots at another, and office tombstones at another. But at least one can get 12 packs of soda for 3 for 12 dollars. Big value.
-More community programs, creates opportunities for older kids, inspires younger kids, gets people out of the house and more empathetic, etc etc.
-More education spending, create smaller classroom sizes, pay teachers more, offer higher salaries to teachers with graduate degrees. Offering more incentives and pay will motivate more people to become teachers, making the labor force more competitive to become a teacher. More educated/motivated teachers in smaller classroom sizes will be able to identify the kids who are struggling with home life, social life, education... whatever. They will also get to offer more relief to them.
-Lower Tuition costs, more trade schools, and less 'waiting for the supermen' rhetoric from schools. Kids growing up feel the stress of needing a college education in order to make it anywhere. But several know they could never achieve it, because for most it's a matter of location or situation at home or maybe they were too late to start trying for a high-grade scholarship. Kids learn at different paces, and primary/secondary school shouldn't be the place to look for these highly-motivated super scholars. My opinion? All primary/secondary students are inexperienced and idiotic. They only really learn about real life at college, trade school, work, volunteering, etc. Sure you kid might know how to integrate at 15, but have they applied that knowledge to anything other than a school standardized test or extra-tutoring? A kid at 15 has no idea what they're really learning about. They don't know why they need to learn this, or what use it really has to them until they have to research or work. Not to mention, with enough time, you can teach anybody to integrate. The highest any kid will learn through primary/secondary school is hardly anything sophisticated enough to be useful yet. Hell, most Bachelor's degrees teach anything hardly sophisticated to be useful yet. Trying to pick out these supermen in our schools while ignoring the rest of the students just creates more of a feeling of uselessness to those potential future mass shooters. Why should they bother learning, while they get the opportunities. Why should they deserve it. They don't deserve anything. So while you ignore all the little kids who usually amount to car mechanics and maids or whatever, there's that one little shit brewing his master plan of madness and the teachers think he's all hunky-dory because he barely passes standardized tests.
