• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 29th, 2023
  • Augustiner@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    10·
    1 month ago

    I think you’re onto something here, and I think it’s a feature, not a bug. The US have been at war the entire time since WW2, but they usually don’t have a draft. So they need to rely on different methods to motivate young men into becoming soldiers. An integral part of being a soldier is the use of violence to solve problems, usually to the point where you might be expected to kill. If your society sees violence and killing unacceptable you’re gonna have a hard time finding people who wanna sign up to do the killing for you. So you honor your veterans more than any other part of your population, you make movies and games about valiant soldiers fighting for the good cause and step by step you slowly manufacture a cultural climate that says killing and violence are legit means of achieving a goal, sometimes even necessary.

  • Augustiner@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    35·
    1 month ago

    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.