The thing is, there is more to it than guns and I think a lot of people acknowledge this. It is said in different ways-- the right talks a lot about kids "not being raised right" or "schools" or "not going to church" but a large part of what many of those old enough to remember (not hucksters and media figures) are mourning is a loss of community and civic life.
One of the things that I was lucky enough to grow up around was a large community of my parent's friends that became like family as my parents did not live close to any family. They tailgated together, they had parties for each other's birthdays, they played games together. This was in addition to the myriad other connections that people forged through work, through youth and adult sports leagues run by the city, and yes through their churches. Pretty much all of those things are fundamentally broken or absent in people's lives.
People don't build any community through any of these places anymore. We are all strangers to each other-- our neighbors, our coworkers, even our friends are all increasingly mediated through layers of alienation. Once upon a time, this here blog site was able to transcend this, we started doing meetups, we lost a dear friend and we built a room dedicated in his honor in the library at our alma mater.
I honestly doubt that now even though we are almost all more wealthy and would be more able than ever to do something to honor one of our friends that we would be able to muster it. The rot is all around us and we can't quite put our finger on it or name it and we can all come up with a million other names or causes from marijuana to COVID lockdowns to mental health to Trump or whatever but it is here and when you add in the rifles and a few mags anyone that is angry and alienated can deposit their rage on strangers.
We finally have found a way to be perfectly autonomous, individuals under no obligation to anyone else.
Basically we are living in Deadwood as Ellsworth describes it:
"I may have mumped up my life flatter'n hammered crap, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker, and holdin' a workin' fuckin' gold claim, and not the U.S. government tellin' me I'm trespassin', or the savage fuckin' red man or any of these other limber-dick cocksuckers passin' themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me."
