It's about guns

attribution: Reuters It's about guns. On January 29, 1979, a 16-year-old San Diego girl took the gun that her father had just given her for Christmas and opened fire at the school across from which she lived. The school's principal was killed, while trying to protect the children. Another adult was killed while trying to rescue the principal. Eight students and a police officer were wounded before the girl was taken into custody. When asked why she had done it, she said, "I don't like Mondays; this livens up the day." Bob Geldof of the first wave New Wave band The Boomtown Rats was inspired to write the song "I Don't Like Mondays," which spent a month atop the British charts that summer, and for years San Diego radio stations understandably refused to play it. Its opening lines:

No one knows what causes someone to take a gun and start shooting people. No one ever will. Every time there is a mass shooting, news reporters dig into the personal history of the murderer, as if something in the biography will provide a clue. It never does. Mental illness, abusive childhoods, collapsed relationships, setbacks at school or work, and any number of other factors often are found, but none provides the answer. Hundreds of millions of people have suffered from mental illness, abusive childhoods, collapsed relationships, setbacks at school or work, and every other form of stress or trauma without deciding to kill people. Why do these individuals become killers? Bob Geldof's answer remains the best explanation, because there is no explanation.

The one thing all mass shooters have in common is guns. That's it. Mental illness, abusive childhoods, collapsed relationships, setbacks at school or work, and every other form of stress or trauma take place in every nation in the world, but of all the developed democracies only in the United States do we have more than 10,000 gun-related deaths each year. Every other developed democracy has some form of effective gun control. The United States doesn't. Those looking for other explanations have reasons for looking for other explanations. People in the other developed democracies watch the same movies and play the same video games, but they don't shoot each other at anything even approaching the rate that Americans do. It's about guns. When that silicon chip inside the head of people in other developed democracies gets switched to overload, they can't just go grab a gun and start shooting. People in the United States can.

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