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If you reduce political polarization, the crazies will just go back to shooting up other targets.
To stop crazies killing people, you need to stop crazies having access to guns. Empirically you can't do this in a society where randos have access to guns - multiple countries have tried, some of them quite hard. This is the fundamental trade-off behind long gun control (handguns are different because they are used in orders of magnitude more homicides). Given how rare psychos shooting people actually is, I think the case for long guns being broadly legal is strong. But if the opponents of gun control are all "Yeah - it's a tradeoff. Thoughts and prayers" when other people's kids are the victims, and "We can't allow 'them' to carry on doing this - when do we start the purges?" when the victim is a sympathetic politician, then I am not going to take them seriously.
If the person who did this turns out to be a sane Democrat or someone with a history of organised far-left activity, then this is very bad news. But right now the way to bet is "psycho with a gun".
This sounds intuitively right to me... but I'm not sure it actually is? There's at least a narrative that shootings (as a form of terrorism directed at the general public) weren't really a thing before Columbine, which was a failed bombing.
(I tried to verify this and was immediately stymied by the fact that, apparently, no one can be bothered to track mass shootings of the public terrorism sort. Both the DOJ and the (anti-gun nonprofit) GVA use definitions that obviously track gang violence, not what most people mean when they say 'mass shooting.' And, anyway, this shooting, while I think similar in intention, wouldn't meet their definition as only one person was shot. Is there better data available anywhere?)
To expand a bit, the narrative is that these sorts of incidents are social contagions of a kind; America before '99 had plenty of guns (more, even, given the Assault Weapons Ban) and plenty of crazies, but the mass shooting meme hadn't yet taken root, so that insanity expressed itself in different, (mostly) less anti-social ways.
Some countries without readily available guns don't have mass killing memes at all, while others (like the UK and I think China?) have much less deadly knife spree memes. On the other hand, truck attacks (France and Germany, primarily) are about as deadly as mass shootings and suicide bombing (much of the Middle East) is substantially worse.
(Bombs are definitely worse than guns, and I understand it's much harder to ban everything that could be used to make a homemade bomb, but actually making a working bomb without blowing yourself up might be beyond most crazies? I understand suicide bombers are rarely lone wolves.)
And so, goes this narrative, there really is a simple solution to these events: stop talking about them. Kill the meme and you kill the behavior. This obviously wouldn't be easy, between press incentives and an open internet, but I'm confident it would be easier than seizing hundreds of millions of guns.
(Separately, I more or less agree that these incidents affect such a small number of people that it's likely not worth taking drastic action to prevent them. But would it work?)
I agree that this would work, and won't happen. The US has an unusually strong free speech culture as well as an unusually strong gun culture, so I don't think it is necessary easier than keeping guns away from crazies.
Switzerland and Canada both have broadly available long guns, but they don't seem to have many spree killings. I don't know if that this is because they are not exposed to the same mimetic contagion (unlikely in the case of Canada) or if their gun culture is healthier in some way which means that fewer guns are stored in ways where crazies have access to them. (Most school shooters use Dad's insecurely stored gun).
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Hope. That's the way to hope. Anyone making that bet without more info is a fool.
Hope, definitely. Bet, too. There is a reference class here - shootings of political figures by crazies with no participation in organised politics is now a several times per year event. As far as I can see, the only time in the internet news era a political figure in the US was shot at by an actual political opponent was Steve Scalise almost a decade ago.
Hypothesis: the Internet (social media more specifically) have made it much easier to become a political partisan with no need to join "organized politics", without which there isn't an IRL grounding and it's easier to find your own personal circle jerk that pushes you extremism. Local political groups are less likely to align with such numbers with such extreme views: the couple dozen most extreme people in your town have nothing on the top hundred in the entire Anglosphere.
I guess one way to check this would be to look at whether it applies equally to small nations with language barriers versus the US. But that's a small dataset and probably pretty noisy.
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