The shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., was the 352nd mass shooting this year that happened also to be on the 336th day of the year. As a nation, we are averaging between one and sometimes two mass shootings per day. It’s unnerving to think you are more likely to die in a mass shooting than in an automobile accident. Our society is becoming increasingly violent. What’s worse is that the rhetoric on the matter is not conducive to a reasonable solution. One mass shooting happens, and the media erupts in a melee of left-wing commentators demanding stricter gun control while right-wing commentators are demanding looser gun control. The focus of their arguments is off base. The problem does not lie with the guns themselves. The real problem lies with the people wielding them.

Individuals who commit extreme, risky behaviors against other people tend to be individuals with an intense aggression. We experience anger when we have been wronged, disrespected, or ignored in some way. That anger can then be channeled into aggression that is carried out through destructive behavior directed toward the self (drugs, self-mutilation, etc.), or it can be directed toward other people (arguments, fist fights, and gun violence, etc.) depending on what triggers that anger. Given this increasing trend in individuals committing these rampage shootings, one could reason that more and more people are becoming overwhelmingly angered, and lack any pro-social means of displacing their anger. But, what exactly is moderating these aggressive responses? Why mass shootings of all things? Also, what are these individuals hoping to gain by committing a mass shooting?

With 352 mass shootings this year alone and more from previous years, there are enough incidences to search for commonalities among them. Scientific inquiry of any potential patterns would allow us to learn more so that we may develop an appropriate course of action in the future. A University of Alabama criminologist had begun investigating these occurrences. According to the research, gun violence is a global problem that is characteristic of every country, but the U.S. has an unusually high prevalence of gun violence. According to Lankford The U.S. accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we manage to account for 31 percent of the world’s mass shootings. The research also attributes three major points that compounded together are contributing to this increasing social trend: fame and glory, personal disappointment, and access to guns. The first two points are tied to the idea of exceptionalism, the perception that a country, society, institution, movement, or period is "exceptional" (i.e., unique, extraordinary, significant) in some way, and does not need to conform to normal rules or general principles. Exceptionalism can translate itself to narcissism to describe the individual. The research points out certain attributes of exceptionalism in high school students to name a few examples of the strain of exceptionalism. It cites several papers from Barna, Schneider & Stevenson, and Twenge that 81 percent of high school students believed that they were going to have a great-paying job by age 25. It also found that 59 percent were going to outperform their parents financially. The more puzzling statistic found that 26 percent of high school students were going to be famous one day.

You may wonder what any of these statistics or any ones related to social strain may have to do with gun violence. Personal disappointment eventually challenges these individuals when their excessively unrealistic expectations they hold for their lives are met with a stunning reality. Their desires to achieve fame and glory and be exceptional human beings are crushed by the fact that majority of us are not going to be well known, nor are we extraordinary in any way (as well speaking for myself). Among rampage shooters, a commonality between them is a twisted hope of fame and glory that is achieved through mass killings. Somehow, their previous ideas to garner attention have become, through some chain of events, extremely distorted. Further research is needed to examine that relationship.

In regard to the third point, the Small Arms Survey found that America has 88.9 guns per 100 people. In and of itself, access to guns is not the direct cause for mass shootings. However, these particular individuals desire to seek their intended goals through more destructive means. That is where our more liberal access to guns then factors in. It seems to be evident that when combined with a culture of increasing narcissism combined with intense personal disappointment, that it is becoming easier for mass shootings to occur. Since this trend is increasing in frequency, one could reason that we are socially reproducing more narcissistic people than usual who believe they are incredibly exceptional.

Culturally, American exceptionalism would be one of the most difficult aspects to change. To change a culture, society would need a generalized desire to establish a more critical yet honest concept of personal expectation. However, to achieve a generalized attitude would require a large amount of time, effort, and social movement. A more concrete change our society could implement would be to limit gun access. But, with the political bantering created by both Democrats and Republicans, even that does not seem to be a feasible option at the moment. Though with this new-found information, a change in perspective may be required before any change can be implemented.

We need to start treating this phenomenon as more of a public health concern, rather than one of the civil liberties. The latter completely negates from the issue at hand. If we are socially reproducing angrier, more narcissistic individuals with a distortion in how they believe they can receive social acceptance and attention, how is it all further linked to gun violence? Nothing mentioned explains any causality. But, they establish basic connections between aspects of our dominant culture and legislation with a dreaded outcome. To further build on these connections so that we can uncover more confounding variables that also could be related – personality, demographics, etc. – more scientific inquiry would be required. However, scientific information is only good depending on who produces it, who values said information, how that information is being accessed, and if it is being used or not. These sort of findings would have to be derived from larger institutions, for example, the National Institute of Health (NIH). However, that sort of expectation can only be met with another piece of concrete legislation.

Since 1996, the Dickey Amendment has banned federal funding toward any investigation on gun violence (mass shootings, gang related violence, suicides, accidental shootings, suicides, etc.). The ban is supported by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and bars both the NIH and the Center for Disease Control from conducting any robust scientific investigation on an increasing social phenomenon. It begs the question: How does one not consider this to be a public health concern when more and more individuals are dying because of this? Countless lives are saved from many of scientific research. With little progress in scientific research on gun violence, there is little anyone can even do to ameliorate this social problem because there is so much we don’t even know. We seem to have a lot of people in positions of power claiming to know what’s best for the country regarding the matter.

To conclude, we are just now, after almost 20 years, really starting to scratch the surface of this issue to uncover a potential solution and independent research is afoot in the right direction. However, this societal problem is exceedingly complex, and the nonproductive, politicized rhetoric regarding the Second Amendment and gun rights has been dominating any real constructive rhetoric to treat this issue as a public health concern, thus making it that much harder to move forward. I will agree that guns have been and are used to save lives. But, we cannot ignore more and more guns falling into the wrong hands to be used for destructive purposes. We also cannot ignore how these people have managed to go through their whole lives to have acquired these destructive tendencies to desire to carry out these destructive acts. If we continue to do nothing and not strike the problem at its core, we could possibly be averaging two mass shootings a day soon enough, and then possibly more after that where gun violence homicides are then exceeding some of the leading causes of death in the U.S. We are creating an aggressively militarized country. That kind of trait is now becoming unique to the U.S. But, that kind of exceptionalism shouldn’t be admired. It is destructive.