It's harder to make a bomb than pull a trigger, but it isn't hard to make a bomb. Bombs and other methods of mass attack aren't used because they aren't as viscerally satisfying as gunplay is. How many first person shooters are there? How many "unibomber simulators?" The use of explosives in killing is largely perpetrated by assassins that wish their actions to be ambiguous, while the use of guns in killing is largely perpetrated by amateurs that wish their actions to be legendary. It's not like Harris and Kleibold planted a bunch of bombs and waited; they planted a bunch of bombs and waded in with trenchcoats full of assault weapons. The bombs were icing on the cake, really, an impetus to launch screaming victims into their line of fire. James Holmes could easily have walked into the theater with pressure cooker full of nails and fertilizer and then walked out again but he didn't - he waded in with a shit-ton of guns and started shooting. Bombs? That's the Tsarniev brothers and they wanted to get away with it. They didn't intend to martyr themselves. Our fascination with guns and shooting is related to personal experience and personal powerlessness. A bomber doesn't have his ego on the line. A mass shooter does. Somewhere in there lies the solution.
If bombs are too impersonal, that seems to support my point, that guns are not correlated to bombs. If we restrict one, I don't believe we will just have equal amounts using the other. They are different tools and appeal to very different people. This is an untruth perpetuated by the media after Columbine, largely because it took time to discover all the bombs and for the public to have access to the boys diaries. They planned it as a bombing, they wanted to beat the record of the Oklahoma City bomber. The guns were the icing, not the bombs. My source on this is David Cullen, who wrote an in depth history called "Columbine" after 10 years of research.The bombs were icing on the cake, really
Your broader point on correlation, yes. I read Columbine. Yes, they had grandiose ideas. They also had a shitload of guns. Tim McVeigh had none. Kleibold and Harris, like every school crazy before and like every school crazy after, wanted to go down in a blaze of glory with their fingers on the trigger. They singled people out. They were very much down with individual killing. Tim McVeigh blew up a building full of people because of what it represented and because that's what he was supposed to do. Tim McVeigh tested his explosives. Klebold & Harris?
They tested them remember? That was the whole issue, they'd been caught with pipe bombs before Columbine but the cops lost the paperwork and never followed up. I'm not even anti-gun, and some of this gun control stuff that comes up is incredibly insulting to anyone with mental health issues. I'm not pretending I have a solution for this kind of violence in my back pocket (ban guns! arm everyone with rocket launchers! ). Besides we are getting to a point where the determined will just 3D print them. Books like Columbine help though, going back and taking a fact-based look at how these things happen, then trying to use that real data to make changes.
They didn't really, though. Every chucklefuck with chemistry curiosity has built pipe bombs. Ain't no thang. Problem is, the way you build pipe bombs precludes going bigger than pipe bombs. Bomb squads hate pipe bombs because you can get grains of smokeless in the threads and opening them up makes them go bang. You're never going to commit mass murder with a pipe bomb. It's basically a grenade that sucks. The leap from a pipe bomb to their propane adventure was fantastical. They may have flirted with explosives and mass destruction, but they were about the guns. Which is something I didn't like about Columbine - there's an agenda to these things. See, I was those kids. The Trenchcoat Mafia was my posse. Different school, but only a couple hundred miles away. We listened to the same bands. We shot the same guns. We wanted the same mass-destruction to befall our fellow students. Difference was, I didn't want to give the bastards the satisfaction of writing my story. I could have walked into my social studies class and fired a clip of 5.56 into the ceiling. Woulda been impressive. Woulda ended my academic career, though, and I cared. Was I going to kill a bunch of people? No. But I know I could have. And it kept me warm inside. So you read a book. But you don't know. You've never done the calcs on what it would take to knock over a mason block wall. You don't know what 5 20-round clips in a bag feels like. You don't know what 30 quick rounds of chinese steelcore feels like under your index finger. You've never blown the harmonic balancer off a small block chevy with an assault rifle; "spall" is a triple word score to you, not a bullet going sideways through meat. You think that guns can be 3d printed, without understanding that a nail, a rubber band and a piece of brass tubing from the hobby store is more than enough while the cheez whiz available for 3d printing is really only useful for the grips and other shit that doesn't matter. People that kill people with guns want their victims to know. They want to feel the effortless volley under their fingers, like Counterstrike but louder and with more recoil. They want to see blood and surprise and know that in that moment, they are godlike, life and death over the mere mortals assembled around them like so many Non Player Characters. The "whole issue" with school shooters is they're willing to trade their futures for a few minutes of godhood. The reason they're willing to do that is they feel powerless and trapped and if they lose enough perspective, it's fuckin' over. If you can't relate to your fellow human being, and if you hold your fellow human being responsible for your lack of opportunity, you, a gun and a persistent slip of perspective can add up to tragedy. There but for the grace of god go I. I know you appreciate that book, but appreciate that you may not have gained a conclusive understanding of the issues simply by reading it.