> That's why school shootings pretty much never happened before the 1970s

This claim is gonna need a lot more evidence.

Here's from Wikipedia all the mass shootings conducted by students prior to the 1970s. They're incredibly infrequent compared to the shootings of today,

March 26, 1893 – Plain Dealing, Louisiana (Plain Dealing High School): During an evening school dance, a fight broke out. Students fired shots, killing two immediately, fatally wounding two more, and injuring a professor (total: 4 killed, 1 wounded).

December 12, 1898 – Charleston, West Virginia: Young men (including students/former students in the context of a school exhibition) disrupted an event, leading to a brawl with gunfire. At least 6 killed (including students) and 4+ wounded in the chaos.

July 21, 1903 – Jackson, Kentucky (Cave Run School): Students James Barrett and Mack Howard dueled with pistols over a card game, killing each other; a 12-year-old bystander student was wounded (total: 2 killed, 1 wounded).

November 16, 1904 – Riverside, California (Indian School): A gunfight between pupils resulted in one student killed, another fatally wounded, and one wounded (total: 2 killed, 1 wounded).

October 8, 1950 – New Orleans, Louisiana (Booker T. Washington High School): Suspected gangsters (youths tied to students) fired on each other; 6 bystanders wounded.

May 5, 1956 – Seat Pleasant, Maryland (Maryland Park Junior High School): 15-year-old student Billy Ray Prevatte returned with a rifle after a reprimand and shot staff: 1 teacher killed, 2 injured (total: 3 victims).

October 17, 1961 – Denver, Colorado (Morey Junior High School): 14-year-old Tennyson Beard argued with a classmate, shot and wounded him, then fatally shot another student (total: 1 killed, 1–2 wounded).

October 5, 1966 – Grand Rapids, Minnesota (Grand Rapids High School): 15-year-old student David Black killed a school administrator and seriously wounded another student (total: 1 killed, 1 wounded).

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m-hodges 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wasn’t asking for evidence of the number of mass shootings. I was asking for evidence of “that’s why”.

	▲	hn_throwaway_99 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		logicchains' "evidence" is one of the most ridiculous styles of argument I see more and more frequently in social media, so thank you for calling them out on it. They made a very specific, unsupported claim, and then when you requested evidence of that, they responded with a completely unrelated set of information that in no way supported their original claim, as if a longer response someone makes their argument more credible. I don't know if it's AI slop or human slop, but it's total slop regardless.

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anigbrowl 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One could just as easily blame the change on the availability of color TV, or cultural shifts that took place in the 1960s.

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bflesch 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Correlation != Causation

I invite you to scientifically work on this important topic. Catch up on previous work by others and then use a proper statistical methodology to do proper research and validate your hypothesis.

Other possible factors that could explain it apart from your theory on SSRIs: more exhaustive news reporting, less wealthy parents and thereby more kids brought up in poverty conditions, more parents with lead poisoning, more kids exposed to plastics, more weapons per household, more exposure to violence and/or mobbing, violence in video games, less third places that kids have for socializing, more social media, more mobbing at school, more unrealistic beauty standards and many others. Some of them might've been researched already and some might not.

Even though you're not trying to do a degree you can always do proper science and maybe also prove a novel explanation.