In light of the shooting in Atlanta, I keep going back to Felix's commentary from the "Run Hide Fight" review episode.
His basic premise was, our mass shooting culture is a byproduct of our dominant ethos of empire. The idea that you can just kill a bunch of people in a foreign country and most people are okay with it, and if you participated in it, you can even be celebrated. All of it cheapens the value of human life. It's specifically become more of an issue as we've increasingly outsourced our wars and the people who fight in them, rendering the Empire more and more invisible. Just because it's invisible doesn't mean that ethos goes away, but it's actually turned against our own people.
I always though that was a really good explanation, but I would love to hear some of you expand on the idea or hear your own theories.
Agree with Felix. Nothing really to add other than neoliberalism makes people snap.
You can go into that a little more?
I mean, the way I see it, neoliberalism is just socially acceptable fascism or fascism with a friendly face. When you have fascism at home and imperialism abroad, you get a society where life is cheap and everyone is pitted against one another under the boot of capital. So it's no surprise to me that people snap, especially young white men from the suburbs who get radicalized off the internet and are socially isolated and raised in a toxic environment of suburban paranoia.
And don't forget the abundance of guns, but I guess that's more the reason we have mass shootings rather than stabbings or some other form of violence