I know this won't be popular, but; it is the MENTAL ILLNESS.

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24. the likelihood that the shooter would have sought and gotten mental health treatment is slim.

even assuming widespread and free availability of high-quality mental health treatment (many huge assumptions here), among the interesting features of many forms of mental illness are various forms of denial or other mental barriers to accepting or staying in treatment.

the rest of your post is a ringing endorsement for doing nothing to address the situation.

yes, there will always be nut jobs.
yes, there will always be motivation for violence.

but many factors conspire to make conditions right for (a) violence to be lethal (b) the number of casualties to be high. and it's absolutely negligent social policy to be as derelict as our society is in making any serious effort to mitigate these.


to my mind, one of the biggest factors is not guns per se, but "gun romance". they myths we have about shooting people, gloriously stomping out evil or being a hero by killing bad guys or standing up for some principal with deadly force, etc. all of these myths are readily seen as over-dramatic hollywood excess by the vast majority of viewers of violent movies, but they're easily twisted and misapplied in the minds of a few people.

if our society viewed guns as nothing special, mere hunting tools, and didn't glorify their use in movies and so on, these incidents would be more rare and involve fewer casualties and less lethality. they'd likely draw upon some other myth to express their pain or frustration or whatever. would they still commit crimes? sure, but they would necessarily be mass killings, and they might not even be violent ones, or they might be self-directed violence. not that suicide is a complete "win", but it's better than mass killings, certainly.