> Okay, let's go at it the other way around: assume it's just
> expression of human nature for people to go batshit sometimes
> and kill lots of people.
Stop right there, fella. How about we narrow down these two terms of yours: "sometimes" and "lots" ... in a country of 250M people and at least 80M and perhaps as many as 200M guns, we have between 5-7 cases per decade? This is what your "statistical analysis" is based on? We know much more about why otherwise perfectly fine commercial airplanes explode and fall out of the sky -- and what that says about the airline business and human nature -- than we do about the (similarly) essentially non-existent "human nature for people to go batshit sometimes and kill lots of people" ... if there's a trend in there, you're going to need an electron microscope to find it.
> Then we should see these school shootings in about equal
> frequency in all industrialized societies with mandatory
> schooling.
You should take that straw man of yours to the desert and light it on fire :-)
> thus there must be something about the social
> relations and social structures in our society that facilitate
> this kind of deviant behavior.
Hey, the US has a LOT of "deviant" behavior, not all of it (I would wager) objectionable to everyone on this list. Why start by looking at what is perhaps the smallest sample group imaginable? Why not just look at the "social relations and social structures in society" involved with a kooky former pop star who can't stop spending money on crazy things and can't keep himself out the news with accusations of child molestations? I'm sure we can draw a few charts about that. Or maybe the tendencies for black ex-football players to murder their white ex-wives.
Statistically, mass-murder doesn't happen in the US. Yes, it's "higher [by a lot, I'll grant you!] than most other places" but really, it's nothing to draw any conclusions about. Especially drawing a conclusion about the "safety net" (which again I'll grant you, is significantly less than in many other places and even moreso recently).
> (--Or it could be any combination of the thousands of
> other ways the U. S. varies from other industrialized nations!)
I'm glad you finally got around to that.
/jordan