Im not fully grasping how the mind of those "copycats" works. People who are obsessed with Columbine for example, and want to do a mass shooting. That is their thought process? Is there some study I can read exploring what's on their minds?
Copycats are motivated by the same thing as the originals, I guess, and just see someone who did it "successfully". (My source is I made it the fuck up)
I've heard it convincingly argued mass shooters are people that a few decades ago would have become serial killers. This is just a new, easier way to kill a bunch of people and feel powerful.
Haha, well thank god we don't live in a society that mass-produces such people, can you imagine?
It really depends. A lot of them are hurt in some way shape or form and in a desperate situation like qooqie mentions and get pushed back into a corner over and over until they violently lash out, and a lot of others have a genuine disdain for other people or a warped personality/prespective on something (like Elliot Rogers and his entitlement to a girlfriend/sex) and rather than try and quell it or get help, they let it fester until they eventuallty also lash out.
The end result is the same. Either they get inspired to do heinous actions because there's no other option in their head to stop whatever they precieve as a problem, or they look at someone else that did them before and think "they had the right idea" and emulate them.
I think this reflects more on the psychology and honestly sociopathy of society rather than specific individuals.
Western society alienates us from the things we do every day to survive. If you're constantly on the knife edge of having the needs to survive, and at the same time you labour to produce insane wealth for others, and this labour is wrapped in a puritan mythos of virtue and "good," people will eventually snap. When access to weapons is easy and a culture of violence and glorifying violence is also involved, it's not surprising that some people snap in a violent way.
I dunno it seems like there's a pretty solid "type" for mass shooters - young, white, male - that means something is left out of your evaluation. Economic oppression (by the owner class) and easy access to guns (enabled by the owner class!) makes it easy for these disaffected people to commit mass violence on the rest of us.
I'm sure if people had more economic security there would be fewer shootings but I don't expect they'd go away. But a lot of these shooters talk about feeling alienated or disrespected. In my estimation that comes from expectations not being met. Probably unrealistic expectations.
(Yes I know "not every shooter is a young white male")
There certainly is a type. I did leave that out of my initial response but it's not missing from my evaluation. US culture is built in large part on white supremacy and toxic masculinity. When you combine these with the Marxian alienation I touched on in my original response (different from but not unrelated to the alienation from unrealistic expectations you mention), you have very high potential for young white men to snap in violent fashion. Another characteristic to add to the young white male profile is US military experience, at least a third of mass shooters are veterans.
Why don't the rest of the oppressed working classes commit these types of mass shootings? Because, to put it bluntly, they already know their place, whether this is conscious or not. We as working people are all oppressed by the capitalist class, and the products of our labour are taken from us. Yet only white people are taught through all elements of popular culture that they are the chosen ones, in a manner of speaking, and on top of that only white men are taught that they were meant to have it all - in liberal/capitalist culture this can be roughly reduced to power, wealth, and sex. When a young white man then struggles to achieve these supposedly easy targets society has told him he deserves, he becomes frustrated, and this frustration has the potential to build to violence against others, especially in a society which, for lack of a better term, celebrates violence like the US. This is very different both individually and culturally to women and people of colour failing to achieve such goals, for the goals society sets for them are very different. I'm also not saying that people do not have agency, but we are in many ways products of our material conditions.
I strongly believe that in a world with not just economic security for all but a sense of social security in our communities and a humanist and collaborative culture, acts such as mass shootings would never happen - the material conditions for them to occur, as I've briefly gone into here, simply would no longer exist.
I can't speak for the suspects, but it's probably many different forms of psychology we're looking at, some of which I know (as long as they're going down) want to take society down with it (what many call a lose-lose-situation, probably the worst interpretation of the parable of the tigers and the strawberry) and some of which see their actions as forcing society forward (known as accelerationism).
