What exactly is it going to take to get people to stop committing these mass shootings?

Nobody screams “Ban them all!”

Anti gun people do!

I’ve never seen that. I see “anti-gun” people, such as myself, agitating for tighter regulations.

Kill off 100%of the people and you will solve 100% of the problem. Guaranteed! (It’ll solve a lot of other issues, too!)

Since the problem is people killing people, killing everyone is literally the opposite of solving the problem.

Nothing works. Maybe free, and better, mental health services.

The mass shootings in the USA are only a part of the story. Every year there are around 33,000 deaths and 70,000 people injured by firearms. An incredible 1.4 million civilians have been killed by firearms in America between 1968 and 2011. This doesn’t happen in any other country in the world and no other country in the world has so many guns or such relaxed gun laws.

The culture needs to get healthier, and we need to develop more empathy and healing skills, and connect and treat each other better in general, and stop dehumanizing each other and pouring our stress into tribal resentment and xenophobia and so on.

We need more emotionally and mentally healthy and adult adults. We need more emotionally intelligent and well men who process their grief and shame and other emotional material instead of locking it inside to fester until it explodes.

We need to recognize and unravel our cycles of toxic shame and child abuse. We need to change our economy so we’re not all afraid of becoming homeless and destitute and abandoned.

If we want to know how to stop people going on suicidal killing rampages, we need to look at why they do, and what we can do to turn that around.

@Soubresaut Not exactly. When all of the people are gone, the problem is also. If the people are allowed to continue on as before, the problem continues merrily along as well.

@Zaku Fantastic answer I totally agree, but will it ever happen??

@SQUEEKY2 I see movement in that direction. I see growing development of such ideas and useful practices in various disciplines and institutions, and more people learning of them. I think eventually that will lead to a healthier culture…

But I also see an awful lot of dysfunction and backwardness and backlash and messed up behavior, and challenges and crises and potential catastrophes which could cause a lot of suffering and impede or block that progress. Environmental and economic crises, wars and other power struggles and conflicts are also going on and driving people into desperation. We have “interesting times” ahead.

It’s quite possible now to find resources and communities and people who are relatively emotionally healthy. Most disciplines that teach techniques for emotional well-being include practices for relating to others that tend to spread the effect in one way or another. Of course there is a lot healing and spreading to be done, and individuals, communities, and systems of ideas that are also organized to resist input and to perpetuate and repeat cycles of shame and abuse and tribalism and so on. There are people at work on how to transform those as well, but it will take time.

@kritiper—you’re saying that the problem is killing people, and so the solution is killing more people. You are literally saying “more of the problem is the solution.” A solution would be finding (a) way(s) to reduce or eliminate the average number of people killed each year. (In case you didn’t notice, a one-year 7,500,000,000 person genocide will really mess up the yearly averages.)

Killing isn’t new.
Killing is definately not exclusive to the US.
As population increases, opportunity for anger, mental illness, victimization increases.
With multimedia comes increased opportunity to know about things which would in the past have been primarily local events turned legends.

Increased population, coupled with increased technology make for new and increased threats.
What we will never escape is differing beliefs, and territorial instincts. Those have existed since the knuckle drag times, and we are stuck with it.

What we must hope for, is evolution of a type which will enable us all to understand the importance of working together to further the human race to new heights of productivity and harmony.
We are still primitive beings, with ails, and huge room for improvement.
Instead of pointing fingers (sometimes as dangerous as pointing guns) we need to work toward advancement of character, as a race.
It is the one skill we have which can set us away and afar from all other species, but we have been so deeply involved with advancement of technology, we have set aside character advancement almost entirely.

Ben Franklin saw the importance of both, and worked hard with each.

I’m struggling to understand this one. Apparently this person showed no history of mental illness, was wealthy, not in a cult, not really political and had no real motive. The regular point and blame game does not really apply here. We may never understand why this instance happened.

Perhaps mandatory exchange of firearms with air/rubber-guns. That should satisfy their shooting desire as well as provide much safetier self-protection measure. The law is already wrong in the first place to allow general citizen to own firearms. Screw the regulation and training and license and etc, people could still break the rules and do what they want with the firearms if they want to.

@ARE_you_kidding_me I don’t know either… Maybe he just wanted to have the high score? We will have to wait for the details.

@Soubresaut The number of people on the planet is not infinite. Not “kill more people,” kill ALL of the people! It wouldn’t be so shocking if there weren’t so many of us. Not doing so (not doing away with 100% of us) wouldn’t eliminate the problem of people killing people.

I’m super gun control and I have guns. I like hunting. I just think if I missed the deer on the first try it deserves to get away while I reload. Maybe I can hit its kid running after mom.

I’m fine with baby stepping it. If you have a gun you need to register it. If you fail to do so and are caught with it you get a year in prison. The penalty for weed is harsher in some states. If your gun is stolen you have a week to report it missing. If you fail to do so and the gun is used in a crime you get the same penalty as the person that used the gun.

@kritiper I’m sorry I engaged on this topic. I want to believe you’re making the point sarcastically, or facetiously… maybe even as a way of saying, “it’s never going to be perfect, but we’ll keep improving anyway, because that’s what we do, because it’s worth doing.” It reads like you’re somehow serious, though.

I don’t know what about your “plan” you think I don’t understand. Killing everyone does not solve the problem of people being killed. It only takes that problem to its most extreme end, and an end is not the same thing as a solution. A solution works to lower the percentage of people who die by violence. Your “plan” does the opposite.

Yeah @kritiper . It’s not sounding like sarcasm anymore. I hope I’m just misinterpreting your rhetoric.

To the question, the short answer is nothing. Absolutely nothing could stop mass killings %100.

Valuing human life more than guns might make a difference.

Not sure if that is possible in the US.

The culture of valuing guns over human life is pretty strong in the US. Lots of studies on American gun culture out there. There are other countries with high levels of gun ownership that don’t have the same experience of regular mass (more than 4) shootings.

It is a puzzler.