France bans guns They get massive massacre. They bomb the sh*t out of Syria. The obvious answer is legalizing ground marshals and a reasonable sidearm.

We are here because of Obama and Hilary.
Even GW Bush couldnt create something literally named Islamic State. Liberals don’t want to ban guns. They want to have government employees control all of them. A good compromise is to certify a million civilian ground marshals. Before we had terrorist attacks we could pretend gun control would work. That horse left the barn.

They also do things like joint the military or become cops or join other socially exciting professions so they can maximize the odds that they will have some kind of exciting adventure, and that, entirely unprovoked, people will ask them to tell stories about those experiences later.

Their brains are aware of the shared social salience, consciousness, awareness, and exposure to certain icons, symbols, and plot patterns, and so they are likely to mimic the scripts that they know get lots of fame and attention.

It seems to me that a lot of these incidents are kind of extreme-end-of-the-distribution cases what is a very ordinary phenomenon.

On the one hand, we need to know whether there is a pattern and profile to the kind of individuals most likely to manifest these tendencies in these extreme, violent ways. What to do about those individuals, both natives and aspirational-immigrants, however, is an extremely hard question.

But if my guess is right, then just as troubling is the obviously enormous role of conventional, entertainment, and social media in broadcasting and repeating these incidents in the most sensational way possible, so that every bad apple “knows that everybody knows” about them, and that they are perfect fodder for instant fame, or infamy, as the case may be. One can hope for some sense of responsibility and restraint, but the norm is unstable in practice since defectors stand to gain and there is no effective punitive mechanism to deter them.

I have not come across any good Libertarian suggestions for dealing with this very real problem.

However, it does raise the question of which liberty-reducing policy – gun control, immigration selectivity, and media censorship – might optimize liberty overall.

Cowen hinted that even more gun control was the right bet, since, if you believe his theory, an incidental benefit from a Libertarian perspective would be the reduction of support for American military interventionism abroad. I can think of a lot of people who would really want something like that to be true, and it has the appeal of an air of sophistication, and so it would be a very seductive argument for them. But it’s too clever by half, and I think the purported result is pretty unlikely. Also, if the bad apples can’t get guns, they will just adapt to use other easy-to-make weapons like improvised bombs.

But of course one could make the same style of argument for immigration restriction, that, yes, it is a liberty-reducing policy, but that it would have the incidental benefit, from a Libertarian perspective, of preventing the electorate from changing in a direction of generating more support for socialist policies.

Notice that despite the symmetry, the former argument gets some fair consideration, because it’s also something the progressives want, whereas the latter argument is dead in the water, because it’s something they don’t.

A plausible explanation, but this account is inconsistent with state level data. Some states (e.g. NY, NJ and CA) have reduced their prison populations (>10%) over the last 15-20 years through various criminal justice reforms and sentencing measures and have still continued to see significant decreases in violent crimes and property crimes – the opposite of what you’d expect if incarceration was the primary factor behind the decline.

Out with a bang, in High Glamour Style, regardless of reproductive prospects, seems more likely.

One wonders if say the NFL, motorsports, extreme sports, all serve a “take a shot at some kind of glory” role, and quiet that need to do “something big” that if left unresolved leads to serious misdrama?

The decline is demographics.
The median age of the USA is on the rise. And the violent crime declined as the population aged. Violent crime is largely committed by males aged 16 to 25.

median age of US population:http://www.statista.com/statistics/241494/median-age-of-the-us-population/

violent crime per thousand:http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/830/violent-crime-has-declined

FBI statistics on age of violent crime offenders:
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/additional-ucr-publications/age_race_arrest93-01.pdf

Chart: US population distribution by age, 1900 through 2060:
http://www.aei.org/publication/chart-us-population-distribution-by-age-1900-through-2060/

Both can be true, given your point 2 above. Violence overall can be going down, but that makes the amoks stand out even more hence the greater focus we give them.