Asklemmy

Switzerland has a social safety net and its people have a voice in politics/government. It's all imperfect but it's there.

In the US everything you have, including your health, is reliant on you constantly proving your worth to a society that is trying to prove the opposite. And any voice you have in society is nominal at best unless you're a billionaire. Politically your choices are culturally determined to be one of two parties that don't represent you and will do nothing for you because they're captured by billionaires.

In a society that's constantly trying to kill you it's easy to come to the conclusion that lashing out back at said society is self-defense. What mental health professional could you afford to talk to that would tell you otherwise?

It‘s not one singular factor, like education or better mental health care or the group of people who own them. Sure, those are all important, but they only in part tackle the main underlying issue why people do these things. Young men (and nearly all mass shooters are young men) in american society are told that they are supposed to be achievers, they are supposed to get rich, be cool, have many friends, get a girl, get a house, get a fancy car and all the other status symbols. But most of them don’t see a way of achieving this, since it’s pretty unrealistic with how things are in capitalism. This tension between the life they want and some think deserve, and the life they actually lead is pretty tough to handle.

Most adjust their goals, or get into political activism, or hustle culture, or drugs or do whatever else to get over this perception of a stolen future. But a tiny group can’t get over it and they are angry at society for taking what they think is their rightful life from them. They usually find other people with similar resentments online, radicalise further, and at the end you have a tragedy. Guns aren’t even necessary, they just make it easier to hurt a lot of people in a short time span.

Now Switzerland isn’t socialist heaven, but there is in general a higher standard of living, better education, better mental health care and less demands for young men to become as rich as possible. There are also more strict checks when issuing guns than there are in some us states and strict rules about storage. So a 17 years old will be less likely to develop the toxic ideology needed to want to do something like a mass shooting, have a better safety net to deradicalise him and have a harder time getting the needed equipment.

This is obviously generalising a lot, so don’t take it as a universal answer, because there isn’t.

No-one has said it, but the USA seems to be an inherently more violent society than any other western nation.

Even without guns, the murder and violence rates are significantly higher per capita than anywhere else in the western world.

Why? It would have to be a guess. It could be poor education. It could be the rampant levels of poverty and drug abuse.

It could be some old pioneer fetish where people think they're some sort of cowboy maybe.

In the USA a cleaning woman was shot and killed because she knocked on the wrong door. That would never happen anywhere else. You had the young black boy shot and killed for simply walking down the street. That would never happen anywhere else.

And those aren't even extreme examples. Like seriously, wtf? Imagine you have a kid going to a friends house and having to worry that he might be shot and killed if he takes a wrong turning somewhere.

What is for sure is that whenever something horrific happens in Europe/Canada/Australia/NZ, there is a sensible and rational conversation about how to prevent it happening again.

There is something seriously wrong in the american psyche

Mandatory military service, gun training, and guns are owned in a context of national security.

Whereas in US it's a 'self-defence' thing so apparently US citizens can fire off a gun in quite a few legal/illegal circumstances. That got extended to school shootings.

Wouldn't happen in Switzerland as it seems to be more a collective national defence protocol.

Mental health/Healthcare deficiency. Lack of education. Those factors play a large role.

I'm afraid the issue is education, as boring as that is. Mid intelligence / educated people realise that giving everyone murder weapons without any guardrails is a bad idea.