Terror on Repeat > A rare look at the destructive power of the AR15 in America

Truth is a curious thing. It can't be found by looking at only one side of an argument, both sides must be considered and both parties must be willing to consider that their view might not be 100% correct. Without the willingness to be wrong on an issue, you can never be totally right.

What did the forefathers have in mind when they wrote the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution? In today's volatile environment, the 2nd Amendment is more important today than ever before. But did the forefathers have AR15s in mind? Of course not! They had single-shot weapons and probably could have never imagined the destructive firepower of today's popular weapons. Nevertheless, if the government turns against its own people, they will have superior firepower regardless. 

This is the quandary? How do we protect our children from massacres by mad gun owners and, at the same time, protect them from the possibility of a mad government? First, let's look at some of the facts in the in-depth article in the Washington Post, bearing in mind that WaPo is hopelessly far-left liberal, like most other American media:

TERROR ON REPEAT

A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings

By Silvia Foster-Frau, N. Kirkpatrick and Arelis R. Hernández;  Nov. 16 at 6:00 a.m.

Mass shootings involving AR-15s have become a recurring American nightmare.

The weapon, easy to operate and widely available, is now used more than any other in the country’s deadliest mass killings.

Fired by the dozens or hundreds in rapid succession, bullets from AR-15s have blasted through classroom doors and walls. They have shredded theater seats and splintered wooden church pews. They have mangled human bodies and, in a matter of seconds, shattered the lives of people attending a concert, shopping on a Saturday afternoon, going out with friends and family, working in their offices and worshiping at church and synagogue. They have killed first-graders, teenagers, mothers, fathers and grandparents.

But the full effects of the AR-15’s destructive force are rarely seen in public.

AMERICAN ICON

A series examining the AR-15, a weapon with a singular hold on a divided nation

More stories

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What does an AR-15 do to a human body? A visual examination of the deadly damage.

A letter from Executive Editor Sally Buzbee on the AR-15 series

Decades of marketing reinvented the AR-15 into a top-selling firearm

Sutherland Springs survivors haunted by an AR-15's carnage, trauma

Magazine restrictions could reduce mass killings by AR-15s, but courts must decide

The AR-15's impact in America: Here's what The Post's examination found

Why do people own AR-15s? 33% of owners cited self-defense, poll finds

Gunmakers' growth in red states marks a divide on weapons like the AR-15

Armed with AR-15s, extremist and militia groups anticipate civil unrest

As guns saturate the United States, police turn to the AR-15

How the AR-15 became a powerful political, cultural symbol in America

Why are we showing graphic AR-15 content? A letter from the executive editor.

The Louisville bank shooter bought a gun despite struggles with mental health

End of carousel

About the terminology  

The impact is often shielded by laws and court rulings that keep crime scene photos and records secret. Journalists do not typically have access to the sites of shootings to document them. Even when photographs are available, news organizations generally do not publish them, out of concern about potentially dehumanizing victims or retraumatizing their families.

Now, drawing on an extensive review of photographs, videos and police investigative files from 11 mass killings between 2012 and 2023, The Washington Post is publishing the most comprehensive account to date of the repeating pattern of destruction wrought by the AR-15 — a weapon that was originally designed for military combat but has in recent years become one of the best-selling firearms on the U.S. market.

This piece includes never-before-released pictures taken by law enforcement officials after shootings inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., in 2022, and the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., in 2017, that were obtained by The Post. It is also based on Post interviews with survivors and first responders from multiple shootings as well as transcripts of official testimony provided by law enforcement officials who were among the first to witness the carnage. Read a note here from the executive editor about how The Post decided what to publish and why.

The review lays bare how the AR-15, a weapon that has soared in popularity over the past two decades as a beloved tool for hunting, target practice and self-defense, has also given assailants the power to instantly turn everyday American gathering places into zones of gruesome violence.

This is an oral history told in three parts that follows the chronological order of a typical AR-15 mass shooting. It weaves together pictures, videos and the recollections of people who endured different tragedies but have similar stories to tell.

Now, Go to WaPo for the article:

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Lunatics Once Again Have the Right to Buy Guns in America

America - Did we just change oligarchs or are the same people telling the government what to do?

House votes to end Obama rule banning gun buys for Social Security recipients presumed mentally ill

© Carlo Allegri / Reuters

The Republican-controlled Congress has voted to roll back an administrative rule blocking Americans deemed mentally impaired from buying guns, an early target of a lengthy list of Obama era rules lawmakers plan to overturn.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted 235-180 to scrap rules that would require the Social Security Administration (SSA) to provide information to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) on mentally impaired persons.

The Obama administration initiated the regulation to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental disorders such as schizophrenia. Opponents argued there was no vote on the rule from elected legislators, and that it violates due process.

And, of course, Republicans are all about due process. This has nothing to do with the NRA lobby and the 4 million people who became ineligible to buy guns. That's a serious hit the number of potential customers for gun makers. But then, there are no rules preventing the sale of guns to drug addicts all of whom can be classified as lunatics when high.

The regulations states that only beneficiaries who met five criteria would be reported to the NICS: individuals who have filed a claim based on disability, are considered disabled, have a mental impairment, are between 18 years of age, and retirement age, and those considered incapable of managing their own benefit payments.

“The beneficiaries whose names we would submit to the NICS must meet all five well-defined criteria. We will not report any beneficiary who does not satisfy all five criteria to the NICS,” the regulation reads.

Brian Malte, Senior National Policy Director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, applauded the regulation in July, saying, “we appreciate the SSA's efforts to submit pertinent information about dangerously mentally ill individuals to NICS so as to keep guns out of the hands of those that we all agree should not have access to them.”

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has opposed the rule since it was proposed, arguing that the courts should determine who is mentally ill, not the SSA.

“The Obama administration’s last minute, back-door gun grab would have stripped law-abiding Americans of their Second Amendment rights without due process,” Chris Cox, the NRA’s top lobbyist says on an NRA legislative site. “Today’s vote was the first step in revoking this unconstitutional action.”

Republicans pointed to the fact that, under the rule’s language, individuals could be added to the NICS database, solely based on the fact that they are considered incapable of managing their own benefit payments and require a “representative payee.”

The Los Angeles Times estimated that the monthly benefits of 4.2 million adults are managed by representative payees.

Republicans contend that individuals who use a representative payee could simply need help managing the benefits they receive from SSA. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that the regulations were “a violation of the Constitution,” and stated that individuals reported to the NICS database would be “guilty until proven innocent.”

With a Republican majority, the House was able to use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal the regulation without Democratic support.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Clyde E. Terry, chairperson of the National Council on Disability, said that using the CRA to overturn regulation was “not only warranted, but necessary.”

The Trump administration could potentially use the CRA to repeal hundreds of rules published under the Obama administration since May 31, 2016.

‘Extraordinary Violence’: Hate, Anti-Government ‘Patriot’ Groups Flourished in 2015 – Report

© splcenter.org

An advocacy group monitoring hate and anti-government groups in the United States released its annual census report showing that such groups flourished around the nation in 2015, growing by 14 percent.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which conducted the survey, called it a year marked by "extraordinary violence from domestic extremists."

The annual report, titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism” and released on Wednesday, attributed the rise of hate and anti-government groups to the exploitation of the anger and fear some Americans felt over the country’s changing culture, whether through immigration, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, or the atrocities committed by Islamist terrorists. The group also highlighted anger felt by white, working-class Americans and some middle-class white people, especially the less educated, over economic pressures.

"Charleston. Chattanooga. Colorado Springs. In these towns and dozens of other communities around the nation, 2015 was a year marked by extraordinary violence from domestic extremists – a year of living dangerously," wrote Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC.

In its count, the report found hate groups increased from 784 groups in 2014 to 892 in 2015, a 14 percent rise, but the increases where notably not seen in what many may view as hardcore groups.

“The hardest core sectors of the white supremacist movement – white nationalists, neo-Nazis and racist skinheads – actually declined…a reflection, perhaps, that hate in the mainstream had absorbed some of the hate on the fringes,” wrote Potok. “But there were significant increases in the Klan as well as black separatist groups.”

Ku Klux Klan chapters boom
The report said Klan chapters grew from 72 in 2014 to 190 last year, with 364 pro-Confederate flag rallies following South Carolina’s legislative decision to take down the battle flag from its Capitol grounds. That decision followed the massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white supremacist named Dylann Roof. The rallies were not limited to the South, but were held in 26 states and “reflected widespread white anger that the tide in country was turning against them.”

The SPLC said its group count likely underestimates the true size of the American radical right, as many white supremacists operate online on sites such as Stormfront, which has 300,000 members and has added 25,000 new registered users annually for several years.

“The milieu of the web is an ideal one for ‘lone wolves’ - terrorists who operate on their own and are radicalized online. Dylann Roof is the perfect example,” the report stated. “His journey began with absorbing propaganda about black-on-white crime from the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens…and ended with the June massacre in Charleston. Like increasing numbers of white supremacist circles, Roof was convinced…that white people worldwide were the targets of genocide.”

Black Separatists also on the rise
The report found black separatist hate groups grew 59 percent, from 113 chapters in 2014 to 180 last year, fueled by “the explosion of anger fostered by highly publicized incidents of police shootings of black men.” The SPLC found that unlike activists with the Black Lives Matter movement, who called for police reform and an end to structural racism, the black separatist groups demonized all whites, gays and, in particular, Jews.

The report found a correlation between the growth of hate groups and a series of lethal terrorist attacks. In addition to the massacre of nine black people at a church in Charleston, Islamist radicals killed 14 people at work party in San Bernardino, California, just days after an anti-abortion extremist killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“After seeing the bloodshed that defined 2015, our politicians should have worked to defuse this anger and bring us together as a nation,” Potok said. “Unfortunately, the carnage did little to dissuade some political figures from spouting incendiary rhetoric about minorities. In fact, they frequently exploited the anger and polarization across the country for political gain.”

Anti-Muslim groups in the spotlight
The report found the demonization of Muslims, Latinos, immigrants and others become commonplace in 2015. (Muslims are already demonized - Allah is Satan). The Center for Security Policy is one of two anti-Muslim groups listed as a hate group for the first time in this year’s report. The other is ACT! For America. In 2015, the two groups started opposing immigration by refugees from the Syrian civil war, drafting model statutes meant to ban the refugees at the county level. Some 30 state governors also said they would prohibit refugees.

“After the San Bernardino attack in December, Muslim activists and other reported an enormous surge of anti-Muslim hate crimes, including shootings, mosque arsons, Koran desecrations, assaults and the bullying of schoolchildren,” wrote Potok. “As the new year began there was little evidence that the hatred was diminishing.”

Anti-government “Patriot” groups flourish
The other big growth area was in conspiracy-minded, anti-government “Patriot” groups, which rose from 874 in 2014 to 998 last year, a growth of 14 percent.

“The growth was fueled by the euphoria felt in anti-government circles after armed activists forced federal officials to back down at gunpoint from seizing cattle at Cliven Bundy’s ranch to pay his grazing fees,” wrote Potok.

Potok said that event emboldened activists to occupy the wildlife refuge in Oregon in January 2016 as a protest against federal land ownership in the West.

Patriot groups need to be very careful. There is a fine line between criticizing and standing up to your government, and fighting against your country which is not patriotism but treason. America is a democracy; let's not turn it into a 3rd world country where the last man standing gets to be president.

An Outside View on America's Frequent Massacres

America’s gun massacre blues seem to play on an endless loop

Suicidal Sam

The tragedy lies not only in the trauma of the victims but in the apparent helplessness of the political class

By Gary Younge
The Guardian via
Gulf News

Within the American polity there is a cyclical requiem in the wake of each mass shooting — a predictable collective lament for a calamity that ostensibly everyone regrets and nobody can resolve. Profiles of the victims emerge as reporters opine in front of police tape, wringing every last detail from tear-stained survivors. Gradually, facts about the shooter emerge, followed by endless speculation about his (they are almost always men) motives before the president calls for prayer and healing.

Everybody knows their lines. With 45 mass shootings already this year (this seems to be the number of school mass-shootings this year; one definition of mass-shootings has nearly 300 occurrences this year) they have rehearsed them often enough. Indeed, the tragedy lies not only in the trauma of the victims but in the apparent helplessness of the political class and the hopelessness that the deathly cycle might be broken.

On Thursday night, following the shootings in Oregon, US President Barack Obama once again changed the tenor. Alongside the tone of sorrow and despair there was anger and frustration. “As I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” he said. “It does nothing to prevent this carnage being inflicted some place in America, next week or a couple of months from now. Somehow this has become routine.”

To the outside world the solution seems straightforward: less guns, more gun control. With roughly 90 guns for every 100 inhabitants, America has far more guns per capita than any other nation and fewer controls on how many guns you can buy, how you buy them, who can own them. Nowhere else in the world has this kind of problem on this kind of scale. This is one example of American exceptionalism few are keen to emulate.

But these arguments, when pitted against the cultural allure of the settler-frontiersman and rugged individualism, the profits of the gun lobby and a tendentious interpretation of the second amendment, rarely get a hearing beyond the comfort zones from which they emerge. “None of us in the free world would have what we have if it were not for guns,” David Britt, a gun rights advocate, once told me . “It’s about freedom, it’s not about violence.”

So however it looks from the outside, from within America the landscape on which these debates are held — when they are held at all — are more thorny. When it comes to specific remedies Obama’s speaks for the nation. A Pew poll last month showed that 85 per cent of Americans support background checks for gun shows and private sales, 79 per cent back laws to prevent mentally-ill people form buying guns, 70 per cent are in favour of a federal database to track gun sales and 57 per cent support a ban on assault-style weapons. But when it comes to the broader issue of gun control, the country is deeply divided. Currently, 50 per cent say it is more important to control gun ownership, while 47 per cent say it is more important to protect gun rights.

That divide parallels the partisan fault line that has created so much dysfunction and stasis from shutting down the government to immigration reform. And while gun rights supporters are marginally outnumbered they are far more motivated as a single-issue pressure group than those who back gun control.

Guns are just tools

The fact that media attention only turns to the issue after incidents such as this also skews the debate. The overwhelming majority of Americans who are killed by firearms do not die in mass shootings — they kill themselves. Moreover, over the past 30 years the number of people killed by guns has actually fallen, as has the proportion of Americans who own guns. Meanwhile, the sale of guns has gone up, as those who do own them generally own more of them — on average seven each.

“Whether they’re used in war or for keeping the peace guns are just tools,” wrote the late Chris Kyle, the US navy Seal made globally famous by the movie American Sniper, in American Gun: A History of the US in 10 Firearms. “And like any tool, the way they’re used reflects the society they’re part of.”

He had a point. There is far more to both gun violence in general and mass shootings in particular than just guns . The absence of a universal health care has made the prison system the principle provider of mental health care in America. The mentally-ill in the US are less likely to be diagnosed, less likely to be treated and more likely to be criminalised than anywhere else in the western world. The presence of mass poverty, significant economic inequality and widespread racial segregation combine to produce desperation, resentment and fear.

Other countries have these problems to lesser or greater degrees. The difference is that no other country has these problems and then a huge stockpile of easily available weapons to virtually anybody who wants them.

And so the requiem continues. A painful elegy for a nation careless enough to lose its innocence on a weekly basis, one which can expend extraordinary resources looking for water on Mars yet is apparently incapable of finding a way to keep its people safe in cinemas, colleges and churches.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

The NRA is Right, Only Because of the NRA

The right to carry arms in America is sacrosanct. It trumps even the right to life. Americans in Roseburg, Oregon were defending the right to bear arms the day after ten people were murdered by a lunatic with three guns.

The NRA when they make their official statement will say that the students and professors should all have been carrying guns, or, at least, the school should have had armed guards, lots of them. The concept of a gun free zone, as the school was, is absurd and dangerous.

How can you argue with that? You can't! It's too late! Any lunatic in America has the right to buy as many hand guns, and assault rifles as he can afford. There are more guns than people in the US, and there are more gun deaths per capita in the US than any other industrialized country in the world. 

A recent new story revealed that they averaged approximately 1.1 mass shootings per day in the US in 2015. (Mass shooting defined as 4 or more people being shot). School shooting happen weekly, with deaths from school shootings happening monthly. The amazing thing is, most of these stories only make local news now. It's not even sensational anymore! Americans have conceded that daily, mass shootings are the price of the right to bear arms without restrictions.

Since 9/11, this right has cost 150,000 American lives. Since Sandy Hook, 142 school shooting have occurred. Is it worth it? It is to the NRA, who, if we dug deeply enough we would probably find that they were originally funded by gun manufacturers and importers. That's what this is really about - money; keeping the inventory of death moving. Of course, now they are self-sustaining, making hundreds of millions of dollars on membership dues and paying absolutely no taxes. 

The NRA, I believe, is the propaganda vehicle for arms merchants to convince Americans that they not only have an unrestricted right to own guns, but that they absolutely need to own guns to protect themselves not just from criminals, but even more so from the government which, it says, is trying to dis-arm Americans so they can be....ah....something! 

Gullible, flag-wearing Americans are convinced that the day will come when it's own military will turn against its own people and start murdering them for...God only knows why. That this is utterly impossible in America doesn't affect them in the least. 

The NRA has successfully created a theater of fear in America. It's a fear that is deflected from reality in that Americans are afraid of what could possibly happen while the most terrifying thing in America is already happening. And the merchants of death are laughing all the way to the bank.

Jessica Vazquez hugs her aunt, Leticia Acaraz, as they await word on Acaraz's
daughter after a deadly shooting at Umpqua Community College in
Roseburg, Oregon, on Thursday that left nine people dead.
(Andy Nelson/The Register-Guard/Associated Press)

ANALYSIS

The evil banality of guns in America

Even Obama seems resigned to the futility of changing the U.S. gun culture

By Neil Macdonald, 
CBC News 

Neil Macdonald is a Senior Correspondent for CBC News, currently based in Ottawa. Prior to that he was the CBC's Washington correspondent for 12 years, and before that he spent five years reporting from the Middle East. He also had a previous career in newspapers, and speaks English and French fluently, and some Arabic.

Conventional journo-wisdom has always held that it's not just dangerous but unspeakably stupid for a reporter to carry a gun in a war zone.

Get caught with one and you instantly go from observer to participant. You can get yourself killed, and maybe other journalists, too.

Your best weapons, the old reporters said, are your wits and your neutrality.

I believed in and abided by that. And I applied more or less the same logic to living in America.

I could have bought a gun there anytime I wanted. A pistol, an assault weapon, a sniper rifle — anything my credit card could handle.

I didn't, though. I'm well aware that the presence of a gun in a home vastly increases the chance of homicide, suicide or accidental death.

Plus, you have to train constantly to be of any use with the thing, and anyway, I generally believe the fewer guns in circulation the better.

But war zones have changed. Journalists are now hunted. And in America, being gunned down, either by someone you know or a perfect stranger, is now so common it's almost banal.

Resigned and bitter

Someone killing people indiscriminately with a gun, or guns, is just another news story these days, and almost a minor one at that, unless the body count is double-digit, or the victims are all kids, or churchgoers slaughtered at prayer, or, of course, if the shooter is a Muslim (in which case it's almost always a huge story, even if there's only one victim).

There have been so many slaughters and rampages on Barack Obama's watch that he's developed a sort of set-piece speech — expressions of grief, speculation on the senseless nature of it all, and, of course, frustration that gun-lovers and Second Amendment fanatics have managed to block or dismantle most gun control efforts.

Sometimes he mixes in some Christian love and we-shall-overcome optimism.

But there was none of that when he talked Thursday about the mass murder at an Oregon community college.

He actually invited reporters to add up the numbers of Americans killed by terrorists in the past decade and compare that number to all the people killed by gun violence in the U.S.

Citing the Global Terrorism Database and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, NBC put the numbers at just over 3,000 versus just over 150,000, going back to 9/11.

'Bad guy with a gun'

The gun lobby actually once feared Obama. It warned its acolytes that he'd take away their guns (a scare tactic that triggered a boom in gun and ammo sales in the early Obama years), but now basically ignores him.

After all, he lost the fight, and he'll be gone soon anyway.

Obama, and liberals across America, thought they had their chance after 20 schoolchildren and six school staff were massacred by a deranged young man with an Bushmaster rifle and two pistols three years ago in Newtown, Conn.

In its wake, the White House proposed some mild gun controls.

Then the NRA stepped in. It basically declared that the school had been negligent.

Schools, it said, should let teachers carry guns, or at least hire armed guards. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," announced the NRA's chief spokesman Wayne Lapierre.

Not necessarily true, but never mind. The NRA essentially terrorized Congress into blocking Obama's reforms.

The gun lobby has also won in the courts, which have largely dismantled municipal gun control efforts in cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the constitutional right to bear arms is literal, and once the Supreme Court rules, that's that.

Nasty corners

But back to the NRA message: After a white supremacist opened fire on black worshippers at a Charleston church in June, killing nine, an NRA board member suggested the worshippers and pastor might have survived had they been armed.

Following its playbook for cases of mass slaughter, the NRA currently says it won't comment on the Oregon murders "until all the facts are known." (Fact: a guy wearing body armour and carrying several guns murdered nine people). But it isn't hard to imagine what it will eventually say.

Allow students to carry weapons, issue weapons to professors, hire armed undercover mercenaries, install gun racks in class, whatever. Just make sure more and more people have guns.

It sounds crazed, but as America's gun anarchy grows, it has a weird logic.

Common-sense solutions — like the crackdown Australia imposed after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 — are not just politically impossible in America, they're impossible, period.

There are as many guns as people in the U.S. Plus, guns don't have expiry dates.

That means that for generations to come, nutcases and violent racists and other criminals will have all the firepower their hearts' desire.

A line stretches outside a blood donor clinic for the shooting victims in
Roseburg. CBC National news reporter Chris Brown said every person he
spoke to in line rejected gun control. (CBC News)

So the old rules don't sound as sensible. If I were to cover war zones again, I might take a different view.

For all the logic of the no-guns rule back in the day, I suspect I'd be awfully happy to have some sort of weapon, the more destructive the better, if my car was headed off by a bunch of characters dressed in black in a Toyota pickup in some nasty corner of nowhere.

America, too, is now full of nasty, violent corners of nowhere. They erupt all the time, and if you're there, you're on your own.

If I spent much time in a public place in the U.S., like a government building, or subway stations, or, above all, a university or even a high school, I think I'd rather have a gun than hide behind a desk, hoping the latest whack job with a Bushmaster doesn't find me.

I might not trust myself totally with a gun, but I trust myself more than I trust all the violent, crazy, evil people the NRA has helped arm.

It's happened. The ceremony of innocence that was once the American ideal is drowned. Common sense is moot. It no longer even applies.

Mass Shootings in the U.S.: Guns, Glory, Broken Dreams

A new study sheds light on why mass shootings in the U.S. are 

'an exceptionally American problem'

By Meagan Fitzpatrick, 
CBC News

A makeshift memorial with crosses for the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre
stands outside a home in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2013, the one-year
 anniversary of the shootings. Study shows U.S. leads world in mass shootings

The shocking murder of two journalists carried out on live television this week has Americans once again asking questions about why these kinds of crimes seem to happen with such frequency in their country.

Three people were shot, two of them died and the gunman killed himself in Roanoke, Va.

A few days before the shooting, researcher Adam Lankford was at the American Sociological Association's conference in Chicago presenting his study that found the U.S. leads the world in mass shootings.

His findings are even more relevant following Wednesday's events in Virginia, even though the deaths of Alison Parker and Adam Ward, journalists at a Roanoke TV station, don't technically meet the definition of "mass shooting" — four or more victims.

5% pop, 31% mass shootings

The University of Alabama professor found that despite having less than five per cent of the world's population, the United States was home to 31 per cent of the world's mass shooters between 1966 and 2012. 

His work discusses the reasons behind his finding, and in the context of the theory of American exceptionalism, he finds that there is indeed something uniquely American about mass shootings.

They are "an exceptionally American problem," he writes.

Using data compiled by the New York City Police Department in its 2012 report on active shooting incidents in the U.S. and around the world, as well as data from a 2014 FBI report, Lankford determined that the U.S. had 90 mass shooting incidents during that time frame.

That's more than five times the number of second-place finisher the Philippines. Russia, Yemen and France followed in that order. Another finding about the U.S. stood out: Of the cases reviewed worldwide, 62 per cent of all school and workplace shootings happened within the U.S.

"Overall, some combination of American exceptionalism, American gun culture, and American strains could potentially explain the commonality of public mass shooters in the United States," Lankford writes.

There are limitations to this study, Lankford noted in an interview.

For example, he only included shootings where four or more people were killed, and only looked at active or rampage shooter situations — killings in workplaces or movie theatres, for example, not gangs battling it out on a street.

Many Americans take their constitutional right to bear arms very seriously, and Lankford's study points out that the U.S. ranks first out of 178 countries when it comes to gun ownership. A 2007 survey showed Americans own 88.8 guns per 100 people. Canada ranked 13th, but is not even close to the U.S. with 30.8 guns per 100 people.

Failing to achieve 'the American dream'

America's gun culture and the widespread availability of firearms, contributes to the country's mass shooting problem, the study says. It found that American mass shooters were more likely to arm themselves with multiple weapons, though they killed fewer people than shooters in other countries.

Lankford said that may be because law enforcement is so accustomed to mass shootings now in the U.S. that they can respond faster and with more established procedures to prevent more casualties than in other countries.

While Lankford's study suggested a strong link between the civilian firearm ownership rate and the number of public mass shooters in the United States, he said there could be other factors that make the U.S. especially prone to public mass shooting incidents.

America puts more pressure on its citizens to succeed professionally and financially than other countries, Lankford discusses in his study, and when Americans have bad experiences at work or school and fail to achieve their goals, they are more likely to respond with acts of violence.

Aurora theater killer James Holmes was found guilty of the
mass shooting in August and sentenced to life in prison.
(Andy Cross/The Denver Post/Associated Press)

"Notably, these strains seem to transcend age and class. In America, students, adults, blue-collar workers and white-collar workers may all be somewhat more susceptible to the social pressures that, in extreme cases, can lead to mass shootings," he writes.

Different cultures define success in different ways, and while Canadians and Americans might seek the same things in life, achieving "the Canadian dream" isn't a national ethos the way "the American dream" is south of the border.

"I'm not an expert on Canadian culture or history, but the American dream has carved out its own mythology and set of expectations," Lankford said.

Killers have often cited a failure to achieve a goal at work or at school, places where shootings happen more often in the U.S. than in other countries, as motivation for their crime, the study notes.

A focus on fame

Then there's also the idolization of fame, which appears uniquely American, according to Lankford. Increasingly in the U.S., especially among young people, becoming famous is considered the ultimate form of success.

"If being famous is one of your most important goals, it's setting up a lot of people to fail," he said in the interview.

"Unfortunately, due to some combination of strains, mental illness and American idolization of fame, some mass shooters succumb to terrible delusions of grandeur, and seek fame and glory through killing," his study says. They realize that the only way they will become a household name is by killing innocent people.

There is no concept of good and evil here! No concern whatsoever with morality! How did Americans lose their value system?

Lankford said understanding some of the social reasons that may contribute to the mass shootings problem in the U.S. is important for other countries such as Canada, given the degree to which American media and culture are exported around the world.

The Columbine shooters, for example, were considered vigilante heroes by other at-risk individuals in foreign countries who saw the fame the massacre brought them. The suspects in a plot to carry out a mass shooting in Halifax earlier this year were "Columbiners," devotees of the gunmen who carried out the 1999 school shooting in Colorado.

"If the lust for fame continues to spread from America to Canada, that would be something that people might need to watch out for," Lankford said.

He concludes in his study that the most obvious step to reduce mass shootings in the U.S. is to reduce the availability of guns — but that's an uphill battle politically. In the meantime, what is more realistic is trying to help those who are struggling to cope with their stress and their strains.

 "For concerned citizens, this provides an opportunity to get them the help they so desperately need, and to thereby make the world both a safer and healthier place," Lankford said.