Moreover, gun control policies, even if they could be effective, would be little more than a Band-Aid solution. People don’t shoot each other just because there are guns around. The Uvalde shooter wanted to shoot up a classroom full of children — that’s the real problem…

The other obvious cultural factor at play is social isolation. We have created a society in which it is extremely easy to feel alone. Fewer and fewer people are attending church; more than one-third of Americans say they’ve never interacted with their neighbors; and the vast majority of young adults say they spend more time online than they do meeting friends in person. To make matters worse, we’ve spent the past two years discouraging in-person interaction altogether, locking children and teenagers out of communal environments such as schools, and exacerbating the mental health crisis that many of them were already experiencing.

Small wonder, then, that mass violence has skyrocketed over the last decade. We’ve replaced traditional community with a fictitious online world — one without any of the guardrails or accountability that typically accompany the former. And as a result, loneliness, anxiety, and depression rates are through the roof, especially among young adults. Indeed, most of the recent school shooters have been described as “loners,” young men who were isolated, bullied, lonely, and angry. The Uvalde shooter, for example, had few, if any, friends. He reportedly dropped out of school and was mocked for having a lisp and wearing eyeliner.