If all 400 million guns in the US evaporated tomorrow, I am 900% sure you would still have a savage, violent, bloodthirsty, and highly motivated populace of wannabe mass murderers. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and you don’t need a gun to cause mass deaths. Just ask Tim McVeigh or Ayman al-Zawahiri.

I really think people who say “it’s the guns” or “it’s mental health” are missing the point entirely. According to Wikipedia, the top 10 countries ranked by per-capita firearms ownership are the US, Falkland Islands, Yemen, New Caledonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Canada, Uruguay, Cyprus, and Finland. When was the last time you heard of anything resembling a mass shooting in any of those countries apart from the US?

Those other nine countries have private gun ownership, and statistically I’m sure they have mental illness as well. The one thing they don’t have that we do have is American culture. I don’t mean superficial culture like our entertainment or clothing styles, I mean the Who We Really Are, deep down in our cultural DNA. We’re a cut-throat, merciless, cold and indifferent society.

People will disagree, but I think that anyone who thinks our mass murder problem would be solved with One Weird Trick is naive at best.