It doesn't hurt that it is an island.

Want to cut down the number of deaths by firearms? Stop tolerating shit like this:

"Shane Patrick Boyle, a founder of Zine Fest Houston, died on March 18 after his GoFundMe campaign to pay for insulin came up $50 short. Alec Raeshawn Smith, age 26, was found dead in his apartment on June 27. He was rationing his insulin after he aged out of his parent’s insurance coverage."

After everything is said and done, desperation/poverty is what should be looked at the hardest. Nothing makes people go apeshit as much as intolerable living conditions.

Universal background checks, bans on high cap mags, etc -- that's just doctoring around the edges. Get the Works Progress Administration going again. And while you're at it, revive the CCC and the PWA as well.

Aside from atrocious working hours and societal pressures, life in Japan is a lot less desperate than in most other countries. The low unemployment alone does wonders.

While I agree with the broad strokes of your argument, positing that life is soooo much better in Japan completely overlooks the sky-high suicide rate there (consistently one of the top countries in the world).

Life may be less desperate, but obviously there are serious underlying issues.

The US government's blind support of massive corporations certainly is a factor. Allowing them to triple the cost of insulin over the past decade or so in spite of the fact that manufacturing costs are stable or even falling is part of what causes patients like the above to ration their supply.

I also found out recently that all financially motivated crime in the US (theft, auto crime, robbery etc.) as a total cost is less than half of the wage theft practiced by big corporations (short-changing vacation time and paychecks mostly). In fact the #1 type of wage theft is underpaying minimum-wage workers, which alone accounts for more than all of the typical "crimes" combined.

If that doesn't lead to homicidal rage, I don't know what does.