...... Our horrific gun problem boils down to entitlement and rage
"...................This will to dominate is what the more personal mass shootings have in common with the more impersonal ones that tend to get national news coverage. The goals are just smaller. Whereas a more typical shooter might shoot up his ex-wife and her co-workers to punish her for not wanting to be with him, more ambitious shooters like Elliot Rodger will rampage among strangers to punish women, collectively, for the same thing. Or perhaps an average shooter will unleash at a party because he thinks someone disrespected him, but your more grandiose types, modeling themselves on the Columbine killers, want to kill the world for not giving them the deference they feel due.
Whether personal or impersonal, mass shootings share two common features in nearly all cases: An overblown sense of entitlement and way too easy access to guns. Easy access to guns is a critical reason for some of the more famous, planned out rampages, of course, but it may be an even more relevant factor with the everyday mass shooting. After all, your typical mass shooting is a hothead who just went off. The reason said hothead had a gun is because we live in a culture that's swimming in them.
More than that, the gun industry directly markets to men who are insecure and have a will to dominate that finds expression in gun ownership. Unfortunately, those are exactly the same two traits that you find in hotheads who react to perceived slights by blowing their tops. In a country where guns are heavily marketed to the people who are most likely to mishandle them, we really shouldn't be surprised that we have the mass shooting problem that we do.