Mass shootings, and especially school shootings, are the "I'm a disaffected, disturbed person who wants to make a statement" of today.
We've been through this with hijackings, and we've been through this with assassinations.
No matter what is proposed, they will continue until actual physical hardening of targets takes place. That's just how it works. There was an ungodly number of airplane hijackings before people would accept the idea of metal detectors in airports. Presidents and candidates used to think it was inconceivable to not mill with the general public. And then things change, and within a generation nobody remembers it being any other way.
While most of these perpetrators are not afraid to die, and even want to die, what they DON'T want to do is fail. None of them wants to end up rotting in jail for 25 years and never even making the news. While someone could theoretically still hijack an airplane or kill a president, the fact that success is likely in the <0.05% range means we don't live with it as a regular occurrence like our parents did.
There's only two options to make that happen:
1) Make the vast majority of gun ownership illegal and remove almost all guns from the population. While various gun control measures can be shown to reduce gun deaths in general, these types of mass rando shootings are not correlated with gun control measures. Because they don't ultimately make a mass shooting difficult enough, with a high enough possibility of failure.
Removing guns from private ownership is not only constitutionally untenable, and politically unpopular, but more importantly, logistically impossible. Even Democrats love guns in large numbers...a third of democrats and over 40% of independents have guns in their house. I guarantee you plenty of the most liberal people you know own hand guns and ARs. This country loves guns, across the spectrum. There is no institution in the country, including the U.S. military, with the resources and ability to remove all guns from the population.
2) Harden targets to make it functionally impossible to execute a mass shooting. This is merely unpalatable, but its largely possible. Everyone asks why, after two decades of school shootings, we haven't passed the correct gun control. But how does nobody ask how after two decades of school shootings, people can still walk into virtually any school with an arsenal? We could make school shootings literally unheard of in 24 months, with fairly basic security measures.
But people are as adamantly opposed to that too. Could you imagine, all the people that cry (rightfully) about school shootings, but then when someone says "well, we can make sure this never happens again, with metal detectors and clear bookbags, and closing campus during school hours"...they are like "My god, clear bags? Dakota can't leave campus for lunch as a senior? NOT worth it!"
Of course, we all know that's because school shootings are not a problem to solve, they are a stick to batter the other side with. Compared to all the problems in the world, its imminently and (relatively) easily solved. But people want to use them to push for a solution that can NEVER be achieved. I'm not even a gun guy, I'm pretty agnostic about guns and gun control, but I know that one thing could never be achieved, and the other could be.
Now, beyond schools, is hardening EVERY location where people amass possible? Well, it's certainly not easy. But given technology, it would be achievable within a generation. And you wouldn't have to acheive 100%, just enough to tip the balance toward "getting caught".
"Oh, there's no way I'm going to go through a metal detector to go to Burger King." People said the same thing about airplanes 60 years ago.
Imagine telling people 40 years ago that they would essentially no longer be able to pay for most things with cash. But we're down to pretty much not paying for anything in cash unless you can buy it in Walmart, and we'll see how much longer that lasts. People get used to shit.
This mass random shooting thing is totally solvable, if we want to. But we'd rather have the shootings than lose the argument.
