> Times are different. For example, using guns other than for hunting wasn't much of a thing. If you had a problem with another kid, you threw a few punches in the soccer field and then were friends again the next day.

This is an incredibly romanticized view of the past. Gun violence from 1992-2019 was significantly lower than the previous 30 years.

And yet the rate of mass shootings has doubled since the 90s.

The vast majority of deaths from firearms are not from mass shootings. This is still true if you look specifically at those under 18 - it's down to about ~2K homicides, most of which are the result of street violence. Mass shootings actually kill less children every year than unlocked guns that they get access to and accidentally shoot themselves or another kid.

Mass shootings aren't even 1% of the gun murders. Furthermore, they are mostly a product of our obsession with them. Mass shootings are for the most part elaborate suicides that include making the person famous. If we didn't make a big issue out of them there would be little incentive to do them.

In absolute terms, is it still a small amount? Doubling doesn't mean much if the number was infinitesimal to begin with.

I'm guessing from the rivers thing you probably didn't live anywhere near a major city. Kids getting shot isn't even remotely a new thing. In fact, it's quite a bit less common now than in the 80s and early 90s. I wasn't exactly inner city, just LA suburbs, but my middle school still experienced three drive-bys while I was there. I knew four kids who were murdered before we graduated and another who shot himself when we were 12. We were banned from wearing red, blue, or Raiders jerseys because the school district was so paranoid we'd get shot. Guns being used for something other than hunting has been around a long time. The 70s were really when it first started to take off, largely because that was when street gangs started taking over domestic drug trade and they suddenly became much better funded and better armed.

You're right, and I should have been more clear with the nuance I was trying to get across. Growing up, guns being used to indiscriminately kill other people was something that happened somewhere else, often associated with drugs/gangs. Even in my smaller city, there were simply some places you didn't go. But, no one considered kids showing up to a school and shooting people. Then Columbine happened which brought it out of the the big/inner city and into everyone's backyard. And around a decade later, Sandy Hook.

And to the original post, there's also an income inequality component. More well off parents probably felt (rightly or wrongly) they could move to a safer place. That feeling has been eroded through school shootings, no matter how statistically insignificant they are.