What fascinates me about the gun/mental health, public massacres debate is the need of some people to believe there is a bright lines between Good people and Bad people.' Responsible gun owners 'and' mentally deranged' criminals can be substituted for Good and Bad humans. To the cultural Right, it is obvious who is a Bad person ( see all the calls for better mental health screening) and Good people ( conservative, Southern gun owners ). This seems to be one of the biggest attractors to Fundamentalist religious practices. Uncertainty is terrifying to some. This impulse to perceive oneself as superior is a big driver for membership in certainty invested groups. The most well know example is poor whites, who could never afford a slave, supporting the Confederacy and enforcing Jim Crow. The poor population was manipulated to keep a docile workforce. The White might be poor but they got enough out of being white that this class fights to preserve white privilege. The reason evolution is threatening to fundamentalists is that it posits that we are not done yet. How can we be in the image of God if we evolve, if we are not finished? An aspect of 'revealed religion' is that what is revealed is presented as a finished revelation. Not knowing exactly what will happen and what is real is unsettling to the Fundamentalist. Thus we have the present; admonishment of the Obama administration for not knowing that fear of fundamentalist Islam should be the only driving force in our foreign affairs. Combine this with a Right wing in lockstep on the meme 'gun's don't kill people, easily identified bad people do.' Funny a movement that does not trust government trusts the government to sort out the dangerous potential school shooter from your own Goth teenager. This allows people to think they will not be affected by any change because they know they are the 'good people'. This is one of the driving forces behind the impulse to become a Fundamentalist. These illusions usually go away once someone experiences the loss of a gun suicide, a murder, a stray bullet and confronts the collateral damage an absolute reading of the Second amendment produces.