Have we become used to or immune to mass shootings?

[henry quirk]

Oh, I'm all for 'em...seriously...hell, ban guns completely! Can't be more control-y than that.

Won't make a damn bit of difference, but it'll make a whole whack of peopke 'feel better' and 'feel safe' (for a while, anyway).

So -- yeah -- control the hell out of those guns.

#

"risk"

If there was some way to eliminate it...hmmm.

There's a fellow -- Alastair Young -- who writes nano and meta- nano at 'The Eldraeverse'. One of his entries is about the major powers of his setting. One particular passage stands out...

Equality Concord
The Equality Concord and its dozen worlds share the dubious distinction of being the galaxy’s only genuinely functional, non-corrupt, decent-standard-of-living-enabled, etc., communist state.

(As opposed to genuinely non-functional communist states, like the former People’s State of Bantral.)

That’s because the Concord’s founders recognized the fundamental problem of Real True Communism requiring a whole set of instincts and drives and incentives and desires that are not commonly found among sophonts as nature made them. So they studied the gentle art of sophotechnology, and they built themselves some nice bionic implants to fix that problem, and create the perfect collectivist people for their perfect collectivist utopia. And then, and this is the important bit, they avoided the classic trap by applying the implants to themselves before applying them to anyone else.

It works. It may not be the most innovative of regimes, or the wealthiest, or up there on whatever other metric you choose to apply, but it does work, and self-perpetuates quite nicely.

Pity about that whole “free will” thing, but you can’t make an omelette, right?

You first.