You should go to El Paso, Dayton or any of the other recent mass shooting locations and educate the people there that this is all normal and to suck it up.
The AR-15 is not the only “assault rifle” used in mass killings so it’s disingenuous to use that as a data point… What we should really look at is the the importation bans of assault rifles by Bush I and then the assault weapon ban of 1994. When the ban expired in 2004, importation skyrocketed as well as the US manufacturing of these class of rifles…
I have a neighbor who is a butcher and who on the side will cut up deer meat for hunters. He too has pointed out how that has declined significantly over the years.
This is my take, it mainly started with the killings at Columbine high school which happened to be at the same time the Internet was becoming popular. Overnight fan websites of the killers begin to pop up all over the Internet - copycat killers. In nearly almost all of the school shootings after in their manifesto you will see two names mentioned as inspiration. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold the killers at Columbine.
These two idiots had their pictures plastered on the cover of time magazine. And then there is the 24 hour news cycle to make this sound like the wild wild West they gets these Incel type people even more excited about becoming the next poster boy of a mass shooting. If you look it’s almost always the same type of people loners, kept quiet to himself, no one saw it coming etc… Think dungeons and dragon nerds with guns.
This is what I think is at the heart of it this short video does the best illustrating what I think has been happening. Even Marilyn Manson who was being attacked then because of his music during Columbine was smart enough to say the media gave them exactly what they craved and didn’t have “attention”.
Doom II, Quake II, Unreal, Half Life, among others were released from 1995 to 1999.
As a gamer I’ll freely admit that it troubles me that most of these mass shooters are fellow gamers.
I don’t think it’s the games, though. I think it’s the culture that was created by the anonymous nature of the internet. That and they already have loose screws.
The dawn of internet, during the 80’s and early 90’s it was drugs that fueled mass shooting, then compound that with internet and online gaming…plus decline in hunting.
Since we had same amount of guns per capital for the last 60 years we can rule out availability of guns.
The earliest major release (and first FPS ) to allow real-time networked gaming was Quake III Arena, released for Sega’s Dreamcast on 24 October 2000. It was also possible to connect Dreamcast and PC, allowing console gamers to take on owners of the PC version.Oct 24, 2000
