The weapons have always been there, the trigger events have always been there, it's the response that has changed, and that's what needs to be looked at. We have children that commit mass murder, and the common response is to deny them the tools they need for killing. Why aren't we also looking at what's wrong with the kids? If were raising killers, we're clearly doing something wrong. I'd like to know what that something is.I think society is getting more fucked up. There's more people who have been dealt a bad hand in life without a way out. Much higher percentage of families where nobody is home with the kids, all parents have to work to make ends meet. I don't have the statistics, but I figure there are more guns around now, too. We should fix all that stuff, but the low hanging fruit is to get the guns out of people's hands, cupboards, glove compartments, backpacks.
We have intractable problems. "An Inconvenient Truth" was IMO a watershed moment. Gore put the climate crisis in relief. Of course, it was there already, he didn't create that. But intractable problems only make things worse. We have an administration that is in denial. The party in power (senate and the white house) are in denial, almost all of them. How could we not have societal chaos now?