I'm 38, and yeah it's seriously fucked. I keep saying this and people still want to plug their ears and scream "it's the guns!".

I'm a prime example, I have ADHD and hardcore insomnia, and I got laid off a few months ago, my health insurance just ended. In order to see a psychiatrist it's gonna cost me $300 out of pocket for the visit, and then generic Ambien is like $120 for 60 pills. I got letters that say I could get health insurance via the COBRA Act of 1985, but it's SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY DOLLARS A MONTH. Healthcare.gov keeps playing commercials that say "enroll now and you can get health insurance for as low as $10/month!". I went on there to look and it's only available for 2024 right now and they want to know your income for 2024. I put in 80k and they said I wasn't eligible, I put in 40k and it said it was gonna cost $350/month.

My dad is 73 and he constantly has to fight with insurance and the pharmacy to get his Ambien as well.

It's absolutely ridiculous.

If it puts your mind at ease at all, crime (violent and otherwise) had been on a decline from 1993 until 2016 and while it has risen since 2016, it still hasn't hit pre-'93 levels last I saw. Furthermore despite what you'd expect, those AR-15s are responsible for less than 500 (all rifles) of our 60,000 gun deaths, which is 0.833333333333% of our gun deaths. In fact, mass shootings account for less than 0.2% of our gun deaths per year. So, I mean "any is too much" yes, but it isn't near as bad as it seems. source

this wasn’t a normal thing until after Columbine.

Things that are relatively new, circa Columbine

• the 24-hour news cycle

• rage-farming as a genre of syndicated media (think: Limbaugh, Hannity, InfoWars)

• selling fear becomes huge moneymaker for opinion programmers (Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, etc)

• politics as a staple on social media comment threads

• offshore groups (like troll farms, etc) posing as domestic political actors, targeting particular demographics

Ready access to guns is of course a problem, but it's probably made worse when all those folks with ready access to guns are bathed in fear and loathing 24/7 by millionaires making lots of money telling them things to make them or their families afraid or angry. Just a thought

The vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent. The idea that mental illness is largely responsible for the prevalence of mass shooters contributes to the stigma already attached to mental illness.

It always weirds me out that the first school shooting I remember occurred a few bit over a year before Columbine. Heath High School, December 1997.

I don't think that sounds terrible at all. We can all agree, I think, that we'd rather this whole situation not happen at all, but of the two cases, one with one dead by their own hands, and another case with who knows how many dead at the same person's hands, there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying you're happy it was the former and not the latter.

Terrible would be saying he deserved it. Or putting someone in that position. Or a variety of other things, but it's not being relieved at a lower death toll.

I mean, sort of makes sense? I assume with the overkill in firepower, he expected to meet armed resistance. Way more than a security guard would actually pose irl. So that I can at least get my head around.

But if he wanted to sneak into the actual caves like the phrasing would suggest, why die in the bathroom?

But the bad guy with a gun still made a victim out of the good guy with the gun. Idk this is making my head hurt.

On the positive side, he would never have been in the news if that happened. So maybe it's happening a lot that way.