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Actually, I've recently noticed that whenever a mass shooting occurs, very little time is spent blaming the shooter, and much more ink and airtime is spent on blaming guns, gun stores, gun manufacturers, toxic masculinity, racism, sexism, inadequate mental health care, inadequate school security, cowardly cops that refuse to attempt to intervene, etc., etc., etc.
I suppose that, in many cases, the default assumption is that mass shooters are psychopathic, and thus, anyone who assumes that doesn't need to spend time considering mass shooters as agents with choices.
There's other factors to this: the strategy of preventing mass shootings by not publicizing the event also means not publicizing the perpetrator, which obviously eliminates the possibility of exploring the person in question as a person and not just some unforeseen force of destruction, and, of course, there's also what you imply in your post; that mass shootings are instead used as evidence to argue for some social change.
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i think this is because there is little need to blame the shooter. it's kinda the default to be appalled by such a thing (for very good reason i might add) and only a fringe few are willing to take the position of defending a mass shooter.
if this was a extremely rare event i'd be inclined to agree but such events are more common than "extremely rare" (it's still pretty rare comparatively). this + the shocking and violent nature of what mass shootings are... well they're bound to cause people to look for solutions.
it's well established that people are at least in part a product of their environment. and since we don't have control over innate characteristics of humans (there's no "is gonna be a mass shooter" gene), the best people tend to go for I think to have some sense of control is the environment.
an aside: and it is fair also i think to recognize and criticize authority responses to such events, but that's a different comment.
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