the NRA was run in the '80's-'90's by Joe Foss who earned the Medal of Honor flying at Guadalcanal. Nobody in those days called him a gun nut. He was also AFL Commissioner and Governor of South Dakota.

I think the posts below hit it correctly. When I was in the Boy Scouts, we had NRA instructors teaching us marksmanship. They were, to a man, WWII or Korean combat vets. They taught us well, were lifetime NRA members, believed strongly in the 2nd Amendment and would have never been able to comprehend the shit that is happening today in schools and such.

Everybody in the Scouts had this sort of training for the merit badge.

Maybe dad's did not parade around with AR-15's, but most of my friends dad's growing up had M-1's or carbines etc they brought back from the war. Heck, my grandfather had his '03 Springfield that he carried to France in 1918. None of his kids or grandkids would have dreamed of even touching that piece without him being present.

I grew up in suburban Los Angeles. Certainly not even remotely a gun culture or hunting environment compared to the rest of the country.

Not social misfits who bought guns to compensate for a trouser deficiency.

That is their only real mission at this point.

to bring their hunting rifle/shotgun to school to go hunting with after school. This was pretty common at rural schools. I accidentally took a loaded 44 to school on a tractor that we were going to repaint in shop class. I walked through the school with a loaded gun to the principals office, where he unloaded the gun and kept the bullets. He then gave the gun back to me and told me to keep it in my locker until the end of the day. This all changed after Columbine. In a way guns were more common at schools pre-columbine.

A heck of a difference between a hunting rifle/shotgun and a small armory to show off to your friends and demonstrate something about your identity.

A larger segment of the population owned weapons back then, but you didn’t have suburban dads with their Yeti coolers and such buying 15 AR’s because they’re cool.

I will say, though, I don’t think those types are the proximate problem. I would worry more about the person completely dissociated from society with delusions and so forth. I certainly think it’s worth exploring why he (always a he) commits spree shootings at a rate that is far, far higher than it was thirty or fifty years ago when access to weapons and the functional capacity of them is essentially unchanged.

Now, whether the suburban dad with 15 ARs’s is the ultimate problem in that he enables a system that provides extraordinarily easy access to weapons is a different question. Maybe, but it’s tough to determine how different that is from what we were like sixty years ago.

I’ve long questioned why the rise has been post-Columbine for spree shooters whereas we were basically in line with the rest of the developed world before that. What changed?

I think media, the internet, and the fracturing and atomization of American culture obviously played a factor, but I wonder if the dying off of WW2 vets played a role as well. Those men had seen extraordinarily violence in their lifetimes and perpetuated a certain kind of culture. Obviously, they abrogated any sort of responsibility towards the impoverished sectors of our nation after the 1960’s, but I don’t think it’s outlandish to think they played a role in keeping social norms intact in mainstream middle class America.

mass/school shootings by young men with apparent social issues or mental illness.

I don’t know what the solution is. Is it medication-related?

Edit: Does media coverage make these events more likely? I don’t know but can’t dismiss the possibility.

Fewer people have a couple of hunting rifles. But more people have a small armory in order to demonstrate something about themselves. It's signaling.

I don’t think there’s any question that the link between access to firearms and overall gun violence is strong, but the question of spree shootings in particular just baffles me.

Looking at the larger picture of gun violence over the last generation or so, if I remember correctly, suicides are way up, drug and general urban violence is way down, domestic violence is relatively similar or maybe a slight drop, and spree shootings are up like 500%. I have no idea why.

ETA: I do think there’s something to the idea that fifty years ago, virtually all of these guys would have been institutionalized. I don’t know how you get around that mountain without severely curtailing civil rights.