Are we ever going to get tired enough of school shootings that we actually do something about them?

[Prophet 451]

57. No, you're not. Nothing will change.

Mental illness, or rather the USA's lack of care for mental illness due to the insurance mess, is a significant contributing factor. I'm mentally Ill (MDD, GAD, "visions", occasional voices) but here in the UK, all I have to do to get help is summon up the courage to talk to my doctor (which I couldn't verbalise, so my SO suggested I write notes). Once I'd done that, I got doctor's visits every month, shrink visits every month and the Community Psychiatric Nurse would visit me on alternate weeks, all carefully arranged so that I never go longer than a week without seeing someone and if I get in trouble between times, there's a duty professional at the end of the phone 24/7.

In the US, your ability to access mental health care is based on having insurance. And probably on having good insurance because many don't cover mental illness. Also, Reagan Christ closed down the mental hospitals so people who should be in secure units are wandering the streets or in jail (about 20% of US prisoners have severe mental health issues).

And your society is awash in guns. According to a couple of minutes with Google, there's about 310 million firearms. The number of firearms, combined with mentally ill people not gettign care means the two are virtually certain to collide.

That said, I don't think you need to go quite as far as we did. Here, all handguns are banned outright and it's extremely difficult to get a license for longarms. I don't think you need to go that far. A robust licensing system, coupled with a properly funded do-not-sell list would likely eliminate the vast majority of the problem.

But it's simply not ever going to happen. The NRA and the gun manufacturers have too much power, the corporations that make guns lobby the same as any other corporation and the people have been propogandized about what the 2nd Amendment means and was intended to do. They're completely certain that their Colt 1911A1 is the only thing standing between the US and gulags and that the Founders put the 2nd in so the people could overthrow government (which doesn't explain why they made it treason).

They've won. Sorry to say it but the conservatives have won. They hold an effective minority veto in Congress (which they'll abolish the second they're in charge) and their pet SCOTUS simply declares any law conservatives dislike unconstitutional and upholds any law they like. The SCOTUS is now just an arm of the Republican party and Scalia doesn't even bother hiding it anymore. So nothing significant is going to happen until the demographics shift kills the Republicans in about ten or fifteen years (assuming they don't outlaw voting for Democrats entirely). All that can be done until then is prevent the worst of their barbarism.