It seems to me that an awful lot of these young men(*) turn out to be flamboyantly mentally ill, and yet their problems were studiously ignored by their parents, their teachers, even the mental-health practitioners they may have come in contact with. In some cases, the people who should have been helping were enabling the violent behavior - Adam Lanza's mother provided him with the guns he used in his crime (he killed her with one of them). Many others were in serious denial: "it's just a phase he'll grow out of", "he needs to spend more time in church, praying", "boys will be boys", "deep down, he's a good boy".

Despite the long-standing misinterpretation of the US Constitution, it really would be a good idea to make it more difficult to obtain guns of all kinds. At the very least, it would reduce impulsive violence; if someone has a gun and gets into a fight, he's most likely to just pull the gun, but if he doesn't have a gun, he'll probably just hit someone, which is a lot less likely to be fatal.

But society also needs to have a better awareness of mental illness and how to deflect disturbed individuals away from becoming violent. Yes, this is as complicated an issue as gun control.

---

(*) I can't recall any mass shootings, or mass killings of any other sort, by young women - and many of the young men left bizarrely misogynist statements in their private writings.