An editorial popped up this weekend from the editorial board at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch analyzing what they describe as “a generational shift on guns.” They start out by somberly reporting polling data that foretells what they describe as “trouble ahead” for Republican politicians who continue to block any “rational restrictions on guns.” According to them, a new generation of young conservatives has arisen that is far more open to certain gun restrictions than the previous generation. And what would cause such a generational shift? The fact that they are exposed to a regular barrage of news reports about mass shootings. The presumption is that these young conservatives are reaching the point of essentially saying ‘enough is enough.’ So the days of greater gun restrictions must surely be on the horizon. Here’s a brief portion of the board’s introduction.

The reality is that we absolutely are seeing more mass shootings (depending on how you define that term) these days than in previous generations. Of course, given the media’s standard definition of an incident where there are four or more victims who are shot, the real number is far higher than the set of examples listed in the article. But as we all know, the vast majority of those mass shootings are the ones you never hear about in the national press because they involve minority youths shooting each other in incidents of gang violence. Those shootings don’t push the narrative forward and they don’t move legislation through Congress.

I found it very interesting how the editorial pegged the start of the “modern era” of mass shootings at 1999 with the Columbine High School attack. That’s arguably as good of a starting point as any. It shocked the entire country and drew national headlines. By the time we reached the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, such tragic events were far more common.

But what the editorial board fails to address is any suggestion as to why the number of incidents is increasing. Is it because our gun laws have actually grown looser over the past 24 years? Obviously not. They have largely remained the same, particularly at the federal level, though many states have introduced more legal carry options. So are people simply more violent for some reason? That idea would likely be a hard sell as well.

With all that said, I will offer a different theory in case that’s of any help. I would argue that the Columbine shooting caught the attention of the nation (and indeed the world) and horrified a great number of people. But it didn’t horrify everyone. The boys involved in that incident had done something that should have been unthinkable and truly was unthinkable for almost anyone. Walking into a school with firearms and mowing down children was essentially the definition of “unthinkable.”

But then someone did it. And suddenly it was “thinkable.” Sadly, there is a certain (thankfully small) subset of people in society who are unstable and capable of things most of us would consider insane. After Columbine and all of the coverage it received, some of those people began thinking that if those boys could pull that off, ‘maybe I can too.’ And the more of them that did it, the more the word got around.

The problem multiplied because this is what psychologists refer to as a social contagion. In that sense, the phenomenon is very similar to the rapid onset of gender dysphoria or transgenderism being reported over the past few years. No, I’m not saying there are similarities between transgender individuals and mass shooters. But for a very long time, gender dysphoria was an extremely rare disorder, classified as a mental illness in the medical community. If you asked some young person back in the early nineties about it, they would look at you as if you had two heads. ‘Turn myself from a girl into a boy? That’s crazy.’

Yes, it was. Until suddenly they started seeing more and more of their peers declaring their “transitions” and they observed the fawning media coverage and support the transitioners received. And then, suddenly… it wasn’t crazy anymore. In fact, at least for some, it began looking downright attractive.

These things can spread, hence the name given to social contagions. There have always been crazy people out there who could easily slide toward violence. But they generally didn’t do things as dramatic and shocking as shooting up a school. More often they would snap and injure family members or even strangers. Few rose to the level of notoriety of Jeffrey Dahmer or the Unabomber. But they were out there nonetheless. And now the mass shooting genie is fully out of the bottle. We need to harden the most likely targets rather than trying to pass stricter laws against the law-abiding who are not on a path to do such things.  There are tens if not hundreds of millions of guns in the United States. Many of them show up in black market sales. If some madman wants a gun badly enough they’re probably going to find one. What we need are better ways to stop them in advance if possible, or as soon as they show up if not. And stop them permanently.