Decision? Yes. Other advanced societies have outbreaks of mass-shooting gun violence. Scotland, in 1996. Australia, in 1996 as well. Norway in 2011. But only in the United States do they come again and again and again.

The story of Australia’s response to its Port Arthur massacre is the most famous (and is retold here). A conservative government pushed through significant gun-law reforms, and the country has had no remotely comparable episode since then. The story of Scotland’s reaction to its Dunblane massacre is less familiar but is also important. The Dunblane shooting was Scotland’s version of the Newtown horror in America. A gunman killed 16 students, and a teacher, before shooting himself. As a Scottish newspaper the Sunday Herald notes what happened next:

Despite gun control measures undertaken since Dunblane, there are still plenty of guns in mainland Britain. … In the 10 years between 2003 and 2012, there were 182 recorded allegations of firearms being used in a school or college in Scotland. There were five years in that decade in which gun murders committed in Scotland still remain unsolved until this day. … Despite these facts, it is highly suggestive that those gun controls implemented after 1996 worked. The year of the Dunblane massacre, gun homicides peaked at 84 across the UK—the most on record. Today, gun killings have dropped to almost a third of that. In England and Wales in 2012/13, the police recorded 30 gun homicides, 12 fewer than the previous year, and the lowest figure since the National Crime Recording Standard was introduced in 2002. Today, in Scotland, firearms account for just 2 percent of all homicides, and [a graph] starkly shows how gun deaths in Scotland have dropped since the introduction of those handgun laws.

Three years after the Aurora shooting, I did an update about all the gun massacres that had happened since then. The toll goes on. Here’s an update just of 2017’s mass shootings from the Mass Shooting Tracker, updated to include early counts of today’s casualties:

No other society allows the massacres to keep happening. Everyone around the world knows this about the United States. It is the worst aspect of the American national identity.

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Here’s the other dark truth about America that today’s shooting reminds us of. The identity of the shooter doesn’t affect how many people are dead or how grievously their families and communities are wounded. But we know that everything about the news coverage and political response would be different, depending on whether the killer turns out to be “merely” a white American man with a non-immigrant-sounding name.

That’s who most mass-shooters turn out to be, from Charles Whitman at the University of Texas tower back in 1966 onward. And from Whitman onward, killers of this sort are described as “deranged” or “disturbed” or “resentful,” their crimes a reflection of their own torment rather than any larger trend or force. They are “troubled” youths, like the white teenaged boy who shot up classmates in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, or the two white teenaged boys who shot up classmates in Columbine, Colorado, two years later, or the white teenaged boy who carried out the atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut. Or troubled older people, like the white man in his 60s who shot up the congressional baseball game this summer, or (on initial reports) the white man in his 60s who murdered so many people today. A report on the congressional-baseball shooter described his “descent into rage.”