There were some good responses in the piece.

I found Anthony Daniels’ remarks to be particularly on point.

Mass killings seem to be symptomatic of some people’s willingness or desire to express their personal distress, frustration, or discomfort in a dramatically public way. This is not confined to America: For example, in 1994 a Moroccan pilot deliberately crashed his plane into the side of a mountain, killing 43 people as well as himself. He was distressed that his wife had left him.

The perpetrators of mass killings seem to be maladjusted people with a grievance against life, sometimes crystallized by a relatively minor incident like being fired from work or rejected by a woman in a nightclub. Quite often they have been justly accused of what they have in fact done. One killer shot people in two brokerage firms (having first killed his wife and two children) after he had lost a lot of money day-trading. Presumably he thought that the opportunity to make a lot of money was actually the right to make a lot of money, a right that had just been denied him. (The right to pursue happiness has long since been replaced by the right to be happy.) Hence he revenged himself upon those who denied him his right.

These terrible killings are different from the serial murders of old that were usually committed for financial gain or sexual gratification. They seem often to be the expression of a tormented egotism, a protest at the refusal of the world to take the perpetrator at his own inflated estimate of his importance. Needless to say, such people are incapable of genuine self-examination, which has been replaced almost entirely in the modern world by psychobabble and sociological pseudo-explanations of human behavior.

Weapons of any kind are obviously dangerous in the hands of such people. I leave it to constitutional scholars to decide whether the Founding Fathers ever imagined that the population would one day bear semi-automatics.