Alex WellersteinVerified account

There will always be malevolent souls bent on doing harm to others, seeking out "soft targets" and targets of opportunity for their violent mayhem. Given your areas of expertise, you know man's efforts have not always succeeded in arms control & controlling behavior of others.

And yet, for some reason, this problem appears to be distinctly American, not a universal human problem.

Potential explanations fill anthropology, sociology and psychology professional journals. It is a human aspiration to create a better society but the bad guys always get a vote in the outcome and we are lousy at attempting to calibrate the bad guys behavior.

Chicago Police Supt., in press conf. yesterday discussing murderer of a police commander, stated some people refuse to play by society's rules". Courts here have history of not giving serious prison time for non-fatal repeat gun crimes. We don't do well preempting or afterward.

Again, I don't think "some people refuse to play by society's rules" really explains why the USA has such disproportionate rate of school shootings compared to *anywhere else*. If it was some kind of universal human impulse you'd expect it to be more evenly distributed.

I also think the idea that somehow we aren't incarcerating enough people can't possibly be the reason that the USA suffers from this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate#/media/File:Prisoner_population_rate_world_map.svg …

That comment was local not broad brush. Here in Chicago, lack of prison space & other factors influence how judges sentence & what portion is actually served. So many gun convictions have been back on street in 1 year. How do we get others to choose turn away from violence?