I think this is really excellent and really a valuable contribution to the conversations about motive.

But their prescription that "in order to prevent future tragedies we must treat the underlying pathologies that feed the shooters’ despair" is really the essential and most misguided notion in this analysis; it's conjoined to other restrictive gun policy suggestions, as though part of an array of remedies, but "gun violence" manifests as a sequence of events not as a simultaneity of factors.

Particularly when it comes to prevention, it can't be said enough that the search for anything "underlying" gun violence—be it racism, childhood trauma, domestic turmoil, criminal pathology, trivial arguments in parking lots, suicidality, despair, or as Wayne LaPierre says, "the evil in men's hearts"—is bypassing the necessary first factor in that sequence, which is the introduction of a gun into the situation.

This is a habit of thinking that seems to feature in just about every mass shooting analysis: A search to expose and correct the hidden underlying repeating common denominator. (And there's no question some factors will appear in a greater quantity—because it is impossible all factors would all be equally and evenly distributed—but that can only mislead one into thinking that the "cause" has been found). I always think of Aristotle when reading a diagnosis that sorts by motive, how for him species was the conclusion of categorization. Once you know the species you're done; everything else is individuated variations that exist within but do not redefine the species. We seem to do the exact opposite: the species of violence, gun violence, is just the beginning of the range of categories and sub-categories which may then each have their own statistical slants pointing to differing causes. You have to wonder what is required to reverse the order and look to the highest principle, stick to that first, and resist the temptation to go down the bottomless whirlpool of measurable, quantifiable, verifiable, analyzeable data.