What's Changing?

I wrote the other day that something has changed in society; my own American society anyway, for sure.

Have people always been this deranged? Are the people changing, or are the methods?

I just wonder if there's always been this much crazy and they just did different things with it - kept it to themselves or different kinds of crime other than shooting sprees (different methods), or if something, like the news coverage or copycat stuff, is triggering new kinds of crazy/ideas (people changing), and/or if more people are just getting more deranged - ie if they had been around 50 years ago, would they have shot up an elementary school then too, or no?

Three options: Would they have done the exact same thing back then (but didn't have the means so readily available? or just didn't have the idea to do so?), would would-be perpetrators have been better able to keep that impulse under control (were fewer people this deranged, or was their derangement less than it is today), or would they simply have done something else besides a mass shooting instead (go to war? Start a war? Stab a few people in the streets and get arrested?)?

Do the new degrees of accessibility to those things, either via news from all corners of the globe on the net, in newspapers, on TV, AND radio (3 of those things are relatively new media), real-time social media sharing, video games and other mainstream entertainment - tv shows, movies, music, etc., have anything to do with it? Is it planting ideas, both for the execution of these sorts of crimes as well as the twisted vision of grand notoriety that they would not have otherwise thought of, without the media constantly extoling the shooters in the form of so much attention to "Who was ___ who shot so many people?"

The old "video game" and "music" factor is an old topic, but if you take all these things combined, it makes for a much different everyday world than they had even 50 years ago, or 100. No doubt people have always been capable of mad, senseless violence, but I think it's vital to look beyond the - significant, but rather surface - layer of "gun control" debate, and figure out the deeper pathology of what's going on, what's changed to give us the issues we're dealing with today.

...Or has nothing changed, and we're just able to hear about it much easier and more often (ie would we have gotten this news from across the country 50 years ago even if it had happened? or has what's changed simply the reporting and accessibility, making it SEEM like a new wave of epidemic crime is washing over our nation and era when it's always been just like this in degree and frequency? (I sort of doubt they were having mall and school shootings as frequently 50 years ago as we are now but it's an option to consider, as I don't know for sure). 

I think it would be helpful to know what fight we're fighting exactly; while guns are the obvious debate, I think there's a hell of a lot more at play than just them that isn't being given due consideration, either on a policy level, or - and perhaps more importantly - on a social one. 

I'm also sort of curious if it wasn't this plaguing our generation (which at this point, I think it's safe to say that this is "our thing", there have been like 3 or 4 big shootings just since I've been HOME), what would it be instead? Or if we could fix this Safeway parking lot- mall- movie theater- school- shooting thing we have going on, would we have some friggin relative peace and safety in our immediate and everyday society for a while?