Why didn't we have mass shootings when I was growing up in the 1950s

Here are some of the answers:

Self Discipline was enforced in a way in which if you didn't conform often you wound up buried in someone's back yard.

Though I was given my own .22 rifle to have in my bedroom along with bullets to hang my gun on the wall (which was traditional) or putting it in my closet (which became more acceptable in the 1950s and after), I was expected to never harm anyone with it or people around me would literally beat me to death on the spot.

Vigilanteism was enforced by the common people everywhere then. If a child did something someone didn't like (anyone's child) that child could be beaten within an inch of his life and society sort of accepted this. (However, there were also limits to this as well).

I remember moving from Seattle to Vista for example and being 4 years old and meeting kids across the street and finding an old car no one was driving and climbing into the driver's seat and playing with the steering wheel only to be dragged out of the car by a neighbor father and beaten pretty good. Though I was terrified by this, this was completely normal then.

There were instantaneous consequences for whatever you did in the 1950s. It wasn't about going to jail, someone might kill you and bury you in their back yard if they didn't like what you were doing.

I'm not saying all this is good but this is how mass shooters were prevented in the 1950s. If you were messed up you could be killed and disappeared quite easily in the 1950s. This is why we didn't have mass shooters then.

Because people killed them at the first signs of this kind of thing. One day they were just gone and people wondered where they were.


However, because we don't have this self-policing aspect of American society the number of mass shootings can ONLY increase exponentially because:

Guns are not the problem.

People who shouldn't have them are the problem.

When I grew up it wasn't' about guns at all. It was about knives and getting stabbed or sliced up by people.

If you get rid of guns people will stab people with knives. If you get rid of knives people will kill people with chain saws and rakes and shovels. It's never ending.

People who are messed up are going to kill people with something. This is the problem.

What I see is that eventually there will be so many mass shootings that people might go back to the old ways of taking out people before they kill 100 to 500 people in 5 or 10 minutes time with an AK-47 or AR-15.

This is all just cause and effect and life is after all sort of like a Science experiment. If one way doesn't work people will find other ways to survive, or they won't.