I respectfully disagree.
Was anything of value learned about the motives of the Las Vegas music festival shooter? How about the shooters behind the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre or the Virginia Beach municipal complex attack?
The authorities dig into the personal lives of these men, the media diligently amplifies their efforts, and in the end we learn what we could have guessed: that these were men with a grievance- the exact nature of which is never relevant, that they felt isolated or overlooked and wanted attention, and that they had access to a gun.
Maybe it’s a failure of my imagination, but of those three antecedents, only the last one seems accessible to public policy.
