Well, it happened. One of the few bright spots of the pandemic was that people weren't gathering in public as much anymore, so America got a hiatus from the string of mass shooting incidents (I remember one weekend in the summer of 2019 when mass shootings occurred in multiple cities within days/hours of each other)......and now that America has reopened and schools are back to in-person instead of online instruction, a mass school shooting happened in Uvale, Texas, devastating everyone around the country and confirming that the trend of mass shootings in America is not over.
America is indeed the only country in the world that this regularly happens. Other languages don't really have a good term for this type of event, the translations above are kind of awkward words thrown together to form an idea, nothing as accepted and used frequently as to be introduced into the lexicon as "mass shooting." The few days following the shooting has been full of outcries for the Senate/Congress/federal government to act to stop mass shooting through gun control, and I agree with this seemingly obvious sentiment: guns make it so easy to turn one killing into mass killing, whereas in countries like China there have been incidents of crazy people trying to kill as many people as possible but without a certifiable killing machine like guns/ semi-automatic rifles.
Beyond the gun control solutions which seem futile because Americans have been asking for it for 10 + years (Sandy Hook mass shooting was 2012), is there anything else we can do, or at least diagnose the problem? I do feel as though those who are clamoring for gun control need to press Congress and make it their No. 1 issue no matter when it is, not just when it's convenient (not get distracted by other issues like racial tensions, BLM, etc.). For example, maybe instead of trying to solve 200 things at one time just hone in on 2 or 3 issues that are in dire straits and emergency, has-to-happen yesterday, like climate change, gun control, and the nursing shortage (this is one of MJ's top issues).
One problem is that because mass shootings have occured before, it's likely to lead to more, if just the copycat instinct of some psycho killers perhaps admiring previous killers and seeing the news coverage that they received, or some kind of perverse satisifaction derived from going out in a blaze of glory and taking others with them (my life is going to be over anyway, I'm going to do something extreme). I forget where I heard this, but a way to deter this (that seems inhumane but might be effective given the alternative now of just doing nothing about it) is to do everything possible to keep the mass shooter alive at the end of their shoot and force them to bear pain for the rest of their lives, or just make them watching videos of the kids they killed that day, because right now it's too easy for the killer to just kill everyone else, then commit suicide or just get shot by law enforcement, allowing for no consequences. We desperately need to disincentive future potential mas shooters.
Part of the problem is the nature of U.S. society: we glamorize the "winners" and leave the "losers" in the dust. Any group of people you've ever been in: everyone gravitates towards the most popular or more successful people, forgetting all about the loners, and the loners just fade away to be forgotten, until they wind up in the news for being the mass shooter. It's hard, impossible maybe, to account for everybody, but it might help to reach down and help the lonliest and worst-off in the society instead of devoting so much energy towards those who don't need it, like following Kim Kardashian's twitter and getting to know every detail of her life, Youtube clips of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial, maybe everyone can try to reach out to one person who has no social media presence is likely hurting or doing badly, that has much more of an outsize impact than being the 15 millionth person to "like" an influencer's tweet. (Bill Maher did a segment like this 2 years ago.........https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGp-omDD3V0)
The 1% of superbad people inflict so much damage to everyone else. It's not that America as a society is full of terrible people and everyone is inherently evil, it's just that the worst of the people can make everyone else's life miserable. Just like the guy on the road who stops his car in the middle of the road to get out and grab his pizza, blocking up traffic, if one wants to use one's powers for bad, it can get really bad.
Finally, one problem I find is that America emphasizes too much to let everyone do want they want to do. That's a fundamental American way of thinking that has allowed it to become the most powerful/wealthiest/most advanced country in the world, where entreprenuers, innovators, scientists are allowed to do what they want to do, and it's great on one extreme but on the other extreme, it allows the worst in sociey to make the downside really bad as well. Kind of like the guy in traffic who wants the freedom to cut you off in traffic or stop in the middle of the road, MJ feels the effects of this problem at the hospital every day: adults who behave like children who still want to be allowed to do what they want to do, like they contracted Covid because they wanted to go unmasked but now need help at hospitals, or people with heart problems/ diabetes who want to eat whatever they want but don't want to accept the responbilities of having medical problems (many STILL order the greasiest/saltiest foods at the hospital even knowing their diseases were based on bad diet). So many people just want to be allowed their freedoms, and it's great when the those who can channel those freedoms for good do it, but often we are also saddled with the freedoms of the worst in society who want to do bad....like purchase guns and shoot people with them. In America we're living with the extreme good and the extreme bad, and in order to take out the bad stuff we may have to temper the good stuff too.
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