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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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