On the prevalence of gun violence in general and mass shootings in particular in the United States: Mick Mulvaney, Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff, blamed mental illness and social media on television on Sunday, August 4. Kevin McCarthy, the US House Minority Leader, blamed video games, also on a Sunday morning news talk television program. Trump blamed the news media through a Twitter tweet Monday morning, August 5, 2019.
All these comments were made in response to mass shootings in El Paso, TX, and Dayton, OH, on August 3 and 4, 2019.
Unfortunately, none of these imagined “causes” are in fact the primary cause of the high number of mass shootings and gun violence in America.
We can quite quickly rule out two of the most popular among members of the Trump administration: video games and mental illness. All of the countries in the developed world have access to the same video games as people in the United States, but none of those nations have mass shooting rates as high as the mass shooting rates in the United States. So clearly, the cause is not video games.
Similarly, there is no logic that leads one to think that the vast, vast majority of people in the rest of the developed world are mentally sane, and the greatest majority of violently mentally ill people are in the United States. No reason or evidence exists to support the notion that rates of mental illness in the United States are higher than in the rest of the developed world.
Trump’s claim that the news media organizations are somehow responsible for mass shootings is so ludicrous it doesn’t even deserve refutation.
The main feature regarding gun violence — and mass shootings in particular — that sets the United States apart from the rest of the industrialized world is the great ease with which someone can buy a gun, along with the sheer number and variety of guns available in the Unites States.
The other thing that sets the United States apart from other industrialized countries is that the United States has a president who, during his campaign and since his election to office, has and continues to foment and encourage white nationalism and violence. In that regard, the United States is unique among industrialized nations in the world.