Guns and More Guns

The horrific news of the mass shooting at Brown University came in over the Internet (“Suspect in Brown University Shooting is Found Dead,” New York Times, December 19, 2025). The alleged gunman, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, had attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, over five decades before the shooting, and likely had classes in the building where the shootings took place. He appears to have travelled to Massachusetts after the Brown University shooting and killed a fellow student from Portugal, MIT Professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro. The Brown massacre killed two undergraduates and wounded nine other students and left millions of people outraged and numb. If a person lives in the US, they are often outraged and left numb when a compass pointing in the direction of sanity is hard, if not impossible, to find. These murders appear to have been grudge killings. In a strange coincidence, I had visited the science building, Barus and Holley, during the winter of 1969 with a friend where the horrific murders would take place over five decades later. I recall the layout of the building, the room where I sat, and the details of that particular room. Such memories seem out of place with the knowledge of the massacre that would take place.

A classmate in the PhD program at Brown described the gunman as “brilliant” and a “bully.” The latter is not a surprise among males who act out violently for revenge (“Suspect in Brown and M.I.T. Killings Is Described as Brilliant but Bullying,” New York Times, December 19, 2025).

Donald Trump wasted no time in turning the horrific Brown massacre and murder of a professor from MIT into an attack against immigrants by pausing the visa programs that allowed students like the Brown gunman into the US. Rather than showing sympathy for the students killed and wounded at Brown and the M.I.T. professor, Trump chooses once again to penalize others. His ability to polarize this nation is endless!

What is at the heart of mass shootings in the US that dwarf such massacres of innocent people elsewhere? This is the Rockefeller Institute of Government Factsheet that lists 509 mass shootings in the US from the 1966 to 2025. The graph in this report is telling, and readers can see the drop in mass murders that occurred during the pandemic and the increase in massacres since then. Perhaps some in the US need to be quarantined from one another to stop the insanity with guns that pervades US society?

So, why the guns? From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter (2021) by Seamus McGraw provides a primer of the moving forces behind the epidemic of mass murder that has long gripped this society.

I combine what the literature says with what I know from a social science perspective about guns. In the US, we’re isolated from one another and the society produces confrontations like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1881) with lots of guns. There are 500 million guns in the US and this is big business and connected to war. War and gun violence are constants in US society. The US has 46% of the guns worldwide. There are 1.5 guns for each person. Worldwide 85% of all guns are owned by civilians. Thirty-two percent of people own guns in the US and 40-44% live in a household with guns.

The isolation of many in the US is a given. Walk into any space where there are cell phones and computers and it quickly becomes obvious that the Internet and these devices isolate people. Enter any public space and the slavish pandering to our devices is apparent. Add to this isolation the feeling that a person is entitled to, or needs, a 30-second place in the sun. Narcissism and ego are at play with many people. Although mental-health experts may argue about mass murderers and mental illnesses, many mass killings involve mental health issues. Columbine High involved bullying and homophobia. Sandy Hook Elementary School involved isolation, serious mental illness, and access to lots of guns, many of those guns with no place in civil society. The US is taken with the myth of the Wild West and machismo on the frontier. Ideological issues drive shootings. Three protesters were shot in Wisconsin in 2020 (“Kyle Rittenhouse charged over protest deaths,” BBC, August 27, 2020). In 2017, protester Heather Heyer was run over and killed in a hate crime as part of the Charlottesville, Virginia “Unite the Right Rally” (“James Alex Fields found guilty of killing Heather Heyer during violent Charlottesville white nationalist rally,” NBC News, December 7, 2018). Other mass murders involve racism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, and a host of other unreasoned hatreds. Some in the US can’t suppress or keep the lid on emotions during a leisurely car ride and the lethal mix of these many variables come into play and often in different ways in road rage. Many mass murderers end their lives after a shooting spree and an analysis of their motivations is of a forensic nature and looking backwards.

Shooters, mostly males, often lack the basic trait of empathy toward others.

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution gives individuals the right to carry guns and provides for the right to raise militias, the latter’s meaning somewhat lost in time and more applicable to the early history of the US. Racism, noted above, has been named as a possible reason why so many arm themselves in the US. Many carry guns out of manufactured fear of others. A society as unequal as the US gives rise to situations where crime does exist, but crime is a reality in many other economically stratified societies and routine gun murders don’t happen as they do in the US.

Guns are linked to militarism. Defense spending in the next fiscal year is over $900 billion, while domestic manufacturing of guns generates over $90 billion each year with sales of guns at about $9-11 billion. Guns and militarism are big business in the US (“The Gun Industry Makes Billions. But How Many Exactly?” The Trace, May 2, 2025).

My first recollection of gun violence in the US was the mass shooting at the University of Texas in August 1966. Charles Whitman’s victims were killed from the University of Texas Tower. He had murdered his mother before the massacre, and murdered his wife after the mass killings (“The University of Texas Shooting: A Tragic Day in History,” Texas State Historical Association, undated). Readers might recall that that mass shooting was referred to in a flippant manner in the movie Full Metal Jacket (1987), when the character Gunnery Sergeant Hartman refers to the fact that Whitman was a Marine Corps veteran. Although separated by decades in time, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting also involved the murder of Adam Lanza’s mother, Nancy Lanza, prior to the school shooting.

My experience with guns was limited to basic training in the army and on assignment in the National Guard. I learned how to use an M-16 during basic training and was assigned to firing blanks on an honor guard in the National Guard detail using an M-1 rifle. The M-16 was used in Vietnam and the M-1 during the massacre of students at Kent State on May 4, 1970. Both weapons intensified my loathing of war. Copycat rifles that mimic the M-16 are sometimes used in mass murders in the US.

I never handled guns again. One of my former students committed suicide with a shotgun several years after I had him in class. A student at the community college where I taught in upstate New York was murdered, along with his best friend, when they returned home for a weekend in October 2015. In between the student who committed suicide and the community college student’s death, I faced an issue involving the threat of gun violence as a counselor in a public high school, the details of which I cannot disclose because of lifelong ethical guidelines involving counselors.

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