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It seems to me that at some times and some places large-scale murder-suicide becomes a meme in a specific oppositional culture (see this Hanania essay for what an oppositional culture is). The best example is the cult of the "martyr" (i.e. suicide terrorist) among Salafi Jihadis in most places, but not in Saudi Arabia or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan where Salafism is not an oppositional culture. This started with the use of suicide terrorism as a not-obviously-insane tactic by Palestinians against Israel, but nowadays it is mostly copycats copycatting other copycats Four Lions style. As pointed out downthread, homegrown Islamic suicide terrorists in Europe were using cars for mass killings often enough that authorities are putting countermeasures in place and "diversity bollards" has become a meme.
Something similar has happened in US Red Tribe, with Columbine being the thing that the trails of copycats lead back to. If you are a disaffected Red Triber then shooting up your school or workplace is something the exists in the range of culturally conceivable options, in the same way that blowing yourself up on public transport or driving a van into a crowd is something that exists for a disaffected Muslim in western Europe.
Are we seeing the formation of an oppositional youth culture with a form of memetic murder-suicide in China? I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Uh, are mass shootings a red tribe thing specifically? It seems like they’re pretty spread out among Americans.
BreadTube would call this "sigma-coded" behavior, and they believe failsons from Red Tribe are more susceptible to it than Blue's failsons. Whether that's true is hard to say. I don't know if anybody has done the work to sort out whether Harris & Klebold were Red or Blue. That's not polisci I personally want to touch.
And then, most mass shootings that make the news & get talked about are also not most mass shootings. So many news consoomers get a slanted view of who's really doing the shooting.
Mass shootings that make the news are whiter than average but mass shootings in general are blacker. It’s possible that this points to red overrepresentation- like in the military- but my impression is that while one or two of the well-known mass shooters were meaningfully connected to gun culture but not staunchly political, most of them were just mentally ill people from broken homes who are hard to place.
And, uh, breadtube isn’t a reliable source.
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Eh. The Taliban made plentiful use of suicide bombers, and the Saudi extremist wahhabism had plenty of 'die for the cause and call them martyr' extremists over the last two decades. You saw more suicide bombers in conflict zones because conflict zones are where you get more desperate / angry / 'I don't care if I die / what do I have to live for' types.
What changed the cultural value of suicide bombers was when suicide bombers started getting associated with targeting muslims as opposed to Jews / Christians / outsiders. I think it was around 2009 round abouts, but even before the rise of ISIS or the Arab Spring there were surveys noting that regional support for suicide bombers as a valid form of resistance was dropping. When suicide bombings transitioned from more associated with the anti-israeli intifada and more associated with civil wars and targetting other muslims, it became less heroic and more problematic.
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