Imma up this from comments this AM then back to woik:
I agree (of course) with your opposition to the American focus on psychology as the lens for interpreting these events [mass shootings]: the thing that sets the US apart is guns. But I wonder if it’s a mistake to treat it in such an ~empirical way, which tends (not saying you do this) to cast material objects and social effects as discrete. Guns are a weird case because their ~function is the power to collapse domains by magnifying and radicalizing agency and making it ‘social’: basically, “I can make you do / say / believe X.” It’s boggling the extent to which masculinity in the US has been reconstructed around a handful of objects (often brands): cigarettes (Marlboro, Camel), beer and liquor (Budweiser, misc bourbons), motorcycles (Harleys), muscle cars and pickups (Ford, Chevy, Dodge), power tools (DeWalt esp), etc. And guns, obv. There are entire sectors of the US where masculinity can’t be understood without taking into account these objects, and of course these commodities and brands can’t be understood without thinking about gender and other forms of oppression. And in strange ways: the cult of the pickup and power tools, separately and (even more so) together, says a lot more about the state of US culture: their implied message is that these Men are capable, they can ‘take care of business’ at home and around — but they also hint at the decline of other forms of affirmation of masculinity (land, employment, unions, clubs and fraternal societies, communal labor like ‘barn-raising’) have become atomized and precarious. (Rand Paul getting beaten up over his FU ‘libertarian’ attitude to the gated neighborhood’s landscaping covenant is a brilliant allegory in this respect.) The regulation of these activities — smoking, drinking, driving and biking, workplace safety — is widely perceived as, in a word, castrating. So, yes, the thing that sets the US apart is guns, and ‘simply’ removing them would go a long way toward solving the problem of mass murders. The NRA has been ruthlessly smart in its efforts to define this subject, but even with all their money that’s just the supply side. The demand side, which as always is closer to the real problem, is American masculinity no longer exists without these props. So I think an empirical focus on guns as a generic commodity ends up a bit like arguing that disarming the Freikorps in the wake of WW1 would have defused the rise of fascism (cf. Theweleit’s Male Fantasies vol 1).