We are very "Gun-Happy" culture that celebrates them as part and parcel of our Go West cowboy society.
When I was a kid in the 1950's..every boy wanted a sixgun and holster set for X-mass and even today guns play a major role in our TV and movies.
We sell war weapons in stores like they were candy and are amazed and horrified when we kill each other with them.
Hollywood glorifies guns and rarely shows the results of that they can do to a human body.
Yes, although in the 1950s ... how many mass shootings were there? I haven't done the online research, but I believe there were very few.
I don't really understand it, and have not done the necessary reading of those who claim to, yet, but ... I have a tentative thesis that the problem is really, at bottom, unrestrained capitalism of the sort the US practices, which leads to a great strengthening of what we may call individualism, or perhaps politicized egoism. (There is even a minor, but very influential poltical movement on the Right which outright glorifies egoism and selfishness.) I'm an atheist, on logical grounds, but I think the fading away of religion and religious practice, has probably contributed to this.
So ... if the universe has no meaning .. if we're just a collection of complex molecules ... if the government is corrupt .. if there is no New World to fight for (which the Left in the first half of the 20th Century believed in, their substitute for a belief in a transcendental order) ... if patriotism is just a con job, the flag a bit of colored cloth, the Pledge a meaningless ritural or worse yet a trick to make us loyal to corporations ... if there are no externally-grounded moral boundaries, as shown by the depraved videos you can easily get, with every sort of disgusting perversion -- and, let's be frank, not so disgusting but definitely over-the-boundaries ones -- ... then add drugs to the mix ... and the rapidly-changing world, the undermining of all authority -- maybe this has something to do with the fact that every few weeks, a crazed individual decides to have his moment in the sun by going on in a blaze of glory.
I sometimes go on Leftist forums and raise this or that objection to their beliefs. My test case is one called 'Friendly Atheist', which concentrates on Christian fundamentalist stupidities and hypocrisies. The level of hatred I get there is slightly unnerving especially since I'm a fellow atheist, and even my politics is not very conservative --as I've said, I'm really a 1960 Democrat. (For instance, I'm fine with gay marriage -- hey it's gays buying into something conservatives honor, just like serving in the military), butIthink it''s petty and wrong to persecute a Christian baker who cannot make a gay wedding cake. But ... this is heresy for these young people.
But what really struck me about these people is their lack of any sort of patriotism. I won't go into details, and Ishould also say I'm an instrumental patriot when you get beyond the normal feelings of anyone my age -- I'm really an internationalist who appreciates the role -- overall -- the USA has played in defending and advancing liberal democracy around the world. But I know that patriotism is what glues this very diverse society together. If its ruling elite of the future doesn't have any, we're doomed. I think the sinews of American society -- the sort of thing that holds society together, that Emile Durkheim talked about -- are becoming dissolved by the Left (aided by the Market-fanatic every-man-for-himself Right).
I don't really have a deep understanding of the what's happening ... I can make a diagnosis, but it's very tentative -- the change in American academic attitudes seems important to me, but I'm an academic and we tend towards self-importance. But the prognosis seems very clear, and it's not good.
My previous wife was a Fulbright Exchange Scholar and I accompanied her to the USSR in 1985 where we lived for several months. I brought a microcomputer with me and did a small tour around the country, lecturing on microcomputers and education, and got to meet a small cross section of the Russian technical intelligentsia. I went back two or three times in the next few years -- I even did a tour for the British Council, lecturing on Computational Linguistics. I came to the conclusion, not at all the consensus at the time, that the Soviet Union was doomed. I thought it would be within our lifetime, and didn't realize I was too pessimistic by a factor of ten. My ex-wife still reminds me of this prescience, when she's feeling kindly. I decided this was so, because it was clear to me that the system, and the CPSU itself, had lost the 'mandate of heaven' in the eyes of its intelligentsia. They no longer believed in the system, at a deep level. That's happened to the American intelligentsia, and it has gotten stronger with each new generation that passes out of our elite institutions.
Anyway, there we are. Hopefully we can avoid a big war, so the Chinese can ascend to the role of leading nation of humanity by the end of the century.