In light of the shooting in Atlanta, I keep going back to Felix's commentary from the "Run Hide Fight" review episode.
His basic premise was, our mass shooting culture is a byproduct of our dominant ethos of empire. The idea that you can just kill a bunch of people in a foreign country and most people are okay with it, and if you participated in it, you can even be celebrated. All of it cheapens the value of human life. It's specifically become more of an issue as we've increasingly outsourced our wars and the people who fight in them, rendering the Empire more and more invisible. Just because it's invisible doesn't mean that ethos goes away, but it's actually turned against our own people.
I always though that was a really good explanation, but I would love to hear some of you expand on the idea or hear your own theories.
but there are a number of imperialist/post-imperialist nations which, i imagine, do not have the kind of mass shooting violence which america has. i think a better explanation would take into account this american peculiarity-- this could be as simple as access to firearms, and/or that the american commitment to individualism/against the welfare state perpetuates even greater anomie/individual detachement, which there manifests from time-to-time as shooters.
a better explanation would also take into account shooter data across countries, as well as an inventory of other kinds of similar, stochastic but not with handguns violence, as well as some kind of quantitative measure of what we might expect to be influencing factors.