Despair, Mental Health, and Mass Murder

Gun control is not the only front, and the only cure. Previous waves of mass violence, like labor massacres and lynchings, are a thing of the past not because the means were eliminated, but because the culture changed, thanks in some part to indirect public policy but mostly due to the continued vigilance of many people about many, many things. Did they forget specific instances of violence? Unquestionably; with nearly 5,000 lynchings over the course of a century, no one could know all of them, much less remember them (and it took a vast effort to produce that total). the totality of them lingered—forgotten, but not gone.