Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
I sincerely hope this does not descend into a flamewar.<p>We can&#x27;t have discussion about this in an intellectually stimulating way in congress, we can&#x27;t have this discussion in the media, we obviously can&#x27;t have this discussion on social media so HN is the last bastion of hope.<p>It is a multi-faceted problem with a lot of complexity. The fact stands that USA has a school shooting problem [1] unlike any other country in the world. My main question is how did we get here? There must be an inflection point in the past - any historians out there who can tell us when did this began to be a thing and what was the root cause?<p>Also any argument like &quot;mental illness&quot; or &quot;ease of access to firearms&quot; needs to explain why the same does not apply to the rest of the world. There are mentally ill people everywhere and many countries have easily accessible weapons, yet no school shootings at this scale.<p>Can we investigate all the contributing factors? What can we do as individuals and as a society to move forward on this issue?<p>(parent of three elementary school kids here)<p>[1] 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;worldpopulationreview.com&#x2F;country-rankings&#x2F;school-shootings-by-country" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;worldpopulationreview.com&#x2F;country-rankings&#x2F;school-sh...</a><p>edit:<p>I see many comments already default to &quot;guns are the problem&quot;. I was hoping for a more nuanced discussion.<p>Let&#x27;s look at data. While US has most guns per capita, other countries are close, in the same order of magnitude [2].<p>For example Serbia has 40 civilian firearms per 100 people (!) and zero school shootings in its entire history. United States had 288 just this year. Why is that? Where does the urge to kill innocent children come from?<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...</a>