In this installment, Retro Report explores how the change came about and whether there is hope for the same in violence-plagued America.

For now, the picture is unquestionably grim. Hundreds of mass shootings occur every year, most of them receiving little or no national attention. Gun Violence Archive, an online tracker of the mayhem, defines that type of shooting as an assault in which four or more people are killed or wounded. The archive recorded 324 such incidents nationwide this year through November, with at least 415 people killed and 1,725 wounded.

Our society is, obviously, heavily armed. So were the Malays of the past, with daggers, swords and spears. There was even an honorable quality to a man’s running amok, knowing that it would almost surely end in his own death. “He would become part of the story of that village and the story of his family,” Professor Robinson said. There was, he said, a certain “aura” to it, not unlike the notoriety that many of today’s mass killers seem to seek.

That aura faded during colonial rule in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. The authorities changed tactics, discouraging villagers and the local police from killing a man who ran wild. Instead, Professor Robinson said, they arrested him or packed him off to an institution. That drained the rampage of heroic quality. “Eventually,” he said, “it loses its appeal.”

Whether comparable tactics can work in the United States is in question. For starters, some mass killers turn their guns on themselves right after their carnage, so prison or a mental hospital is out of the picture. And the British and Dutch colonialists had no Bill of Rights to obey. The Second Amendment complicates any attempt to confiscate the arsenal of even a man known to be deranged, and the First Amendment makes it virtually impossible to stop news organizations from writing extensively about a mass killer — and possibly creating copycats in the process.