It's a sad cycle. We're talking about mostly young people with very limited world experience and very limited reasoning ability. Culture has a more pronounced effect on people like that. One incredibly repulsive part of American culture is that young, angry white men occasionally take guns to their schools and start killing people.

They literally do it because other young white people have done it. It's no different than Trump cultists passing around images of a cartoon frog constantly. It's an idea that wormed its way into the societal consciousness and now sits there, infecting new generations of young white people.

If we stopped talking about mass shootings, they'd almost entirely disappear. Like any meme, it'll die if it passes out of memory. In the age of 24-hour news networks, that's never going to happen, though. The future's practically certain to contain many more angry white men committing mass murders.