Blaming the victim, social responsibility, and more guns!

I know, it's getting to be old hat by now, but I keep seeing people say dumb stuff! Today I saw an article linked on Facebook titled: There's a Way to Stop Mass Shootings, and You Won't Like it. Now besides the dumb click-bait title, I have actual problems with the content, despite a good chunk of it not diverging too far from some of my own recent thoughts on the topic.

The solution, the writer of the article tells us, is to reach out to the weird kid in class, to try to talk to the coworker who seems isolated, basically to draw those who might become dangers into the community, and I can see that on some level, people tend to not want to destroy those they feel a connection to, but here's the thing. It is not the responsibility of a victim group to prevent crimes against them.

Let's take this scenario, woman in Writing  121 notices a classmate, a boy, kinda geeky, never talks to anyone, if he shares writing it always involves themes of being alone, maybe anger as well. She asks him out for coffee, they have a date, he rapes her.

What is the usual reaction to the woman? I'll tell you right now it isn't the community telling her "Good on you for reaching out to the weird kid."
Did anyone worth listening too really believe it was women's fault when Elliot Rodger went on his killing spree? He seemed to think so, yet no one rational will try to tell you that some poor lady should have taken one for the team and slept with him. Because that is stupid, and they are stupid.

Social isolation is a problem for a lot of people who will never even think of murdering strangers, I do not know how to solve it either, but I don't think forcing relationships is the answer, in any case, the shooters are hardly universally isolated loners with no friends and who no one attempted to be friendly with, Elliot Rodger apparently rebuffed many attempts at friendship in the years leading up to his rampage, Dylan Roof of the Charleston shooting had a social group he was relatively active in, even including black friends, the Columbine shooting was committed by two people, and so on.

People desperately want to find any reason for these shootings, they come up with all sorts of reasons it can't be that guns and a culture of Toxic Masculinity is the problem, we see arguments that range from "It's not actually a problem, shut up" to "The solution is more guns." and now we are seeing "We should be nicer to each other."
Now that is true, we should be nicer to each other, but it isn't gonna stop shootings, and telling the victims that if only they had hugged the weird kid they wouldn't have been shot is actually pretty awful, no matter how much you dress it up.

We can and should blame society for setting up a culture that encourages violence and provides the tools to make it easy to commit, we can, and should, work to change that culture and take away those tools, that responsibility is on every single one of us, and the deaths of those killed because we don't change are also on us in part. But in the end one person is to blame for the decision to take a gun and go out to kill strangers, and that is the man who pulled the trigger.