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Yes, and most European countries use a Swiss cheese model to avoid mass shootings:
This won't stop all shooters, but will stop lots of them.
Czechia is a very interesting outlier, though, as it's both gun-friendly and gun-safe at the same time. I would look at them specifically if the goal is reducing gun deaths in the US.
If Europe’s gun control laws are that stringent I’d imagine it’s just easier to buy an illegal firearm on the underground market, obliterate the serial number and take the usual measures to hide it. The continuous bureaucracy behind owning a legitimate one almost seems not worth the hassle.
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The US had none of this in the 1940s. You could mail order a carbine and yet people didn't snap and shoot up places at anywhere near the same rate.
Why?
The deadliest mass killing at a school continues to be the Bath School Disaster, which was a bombing in in 1927 that killed 40.
I think it's possible that our relatively easy access to guns may increase the frequency but lessen the scale of each individual event. Guns aren't the most effective way to kill large numbers of people, explosives are. A killer may reach for a gun because it's eaiser than constructing a bomb, and not all killers are capable of bomb construction.
The Columbine killers constructed something like a hundred bombs, but are only remembered for their mass shooting "backup plan" because their bombs mostly failed to detonate. It's hard to call anything about a massacre "lucky", but although the mass shooting had dozens of victims (including 13 deaths), their biggest bombs could have had hundreds.
There's also killers who are too capable of making a bomb detonate. Bombing victims are often immediately bombing suspects, because even murderers who can make working bombs have a tendency to bomb themselves with one sooner or later.
As far as I know, those 'hundreds of bombs' were actually 8 standard propane tanks bought from a store. It appears that they, being more or less average teenagers except for their murderous urges, just assumed that detonating those is a rather easy thing to do when in reality such tanks are manufactured with safe usage in mind for heating purposes. Are you referring to the pipe bombs they made earlier but did not eventually bring with them? I think those are only marginally useful.
Wiki claims 99 bombs, including 15 converted propane tanks, but apparently only 4 of those were full standard 20-pound tanks.
Yeah, that's the "not all killers are capable of bomb construction" category. The strength of the tanks wasn't even a big deal until the second time the murderers tried to set them off (with other bombs and/or guns); the initial failures on those were just bad timers.
Digging into the details does make me have to retract the claim that "their biggest bombs could have had hundreds" of deaths. There were nearly 500 kids in the cafeteria when the bombs there were supposed to detonate, and there was a Sheriff's report claiming that "Computer modeling substantiated by field testing indicated that had those two large 20-lb. propane bombs detonated with a cafeteria full of students, most would have been killed or severely injured by the resulting blasts and subsequent fireballs." ... but that claim seems to be depending pretty decisively on "detonated". Even if the cafeteria bombs had gone off it seems to me that it would have been a conflagration but not a detonation ... at most! One of their other big propane bombs was supposed to be a "car bomb", but (when the bomb squad finally set it off; its timer also failed) it didn't do much more than blow out the car windows.
Some were left around as diversions, but Wiki claims they brought enough with them to be "throwing pipe bombs in several directions, including onto the roof" while outside, along with multiple separate pipe-bomb throwing incidents in the hallways.
As far as I can tell that's correct and even "marginally useful" is an overstatement. Their distraction bombs caused "a small fire", their first pipe bomb outside the school "only partially detonated, causing it to give off smoke" that was interpreted as a prank, and most of the bombs didn't detonate at all. I can't find any sources unequivocally identifying a single wound from a bomb! Even the few reports of "shrapnel" I find seem to be talking about a teacher and two students who took indirect impacts from debris like splintered wood kicked up by near-miss gun shots. The bombs were just distraction and delay in the end; they could have brought a ton of smoke bombs and just called in a phony threat of real bombs and the consequences would have been the same.
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Well, in the early 1940s, the US government would just straight up pay violent men who wanted to shoot people. This was also the case in the early 1950s, and the late 1960s to early 1970s, and from late 2001 until about 2006 or so (I know that war went on for a bit longer but the enemy had been more or less completely defeated by then).
In the later half of the 1940s up until about October 1973, there was an unprecedented economic boom that meant you could quit school right at the cusp of biological adulthood (14-16) and have an easy middle-class existence until you retired at 55.
There were things to do and a future. Not so much now.
I think a big part of it is that disturbed, weird loners just dropped out of school and lived live as relatively poor people- when their urges surfaced, school wasn’t at the top of their mind.
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I burst out laughing reading this after your first sentence. I said to myself, “Yeah. keep going…”, and you did not disappoint. I thought you were going to try and break with the pattern much earlier. This has always been the way the US does this shit.
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Are you familiar with the book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion in America by any chance? Here's a review from the Guardian.
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Someone did an analysis a few years back on this type of thing. I don’t recall who it was but one thing they showed was that the occurrence of such incidents ebbed and flowed, but that pattern of activity although it waxes and wanes hasn’t profoundly changed all that much for a long time. What has changed a lot was the frequency of news reporting around the issue, which had a very perceptible shift in the public consciousness about how they view things.
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More rigid social norms? High-trust society?
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