It's not just gun control that the US, or any of us, needs.

Many people have immediately pointed to gun control or, to put it more accurately, lack of gun control, as the key factor in the Charleston massacre. Others allege that the crime is a symptom of a fundamental and eradicable vein of racism at the heart of America, especially in the South.  John Stewart sombrely lamented that the Confederate flag still flies above buildings in South Carolina.

What these explanations are at pains to contradict is the notion of the solitary deranged shooter as the sole cause of the tragedy. They seek to lay the blame on more deep-seated social problems.
Of course we cannot simply dismiss the implication that this shooter was deranged in some way but, in understanding events like this, we have to look at the interaction between multiple factors.

The strict definition of a “cause” is something that it is a sine qua non which means “without which, not”. That is to say, if it had not occurred, the outcome would not have occurred. In this case we can define three separate causes - three separate essential factors - leading to the Charleston massacre.

The first is the ongoing, deep-seated, residual racism in the southern states of America. Now, of course there is racism everywhere to some degree in the U.S. and the world in general, but the South, which had slavery until 165 years ago and bitterly resented losing it, where people still drive cars with Confederate stickers, where racial integration had to be enforced by Federal troops as recently as the 1960s, and the Ku Klux Klan was a significant political force well into the second half of the 20^th century, and perhaps still is, continues, like a diseased organ to harbour the infection of racial prejudice and hatred.  Still, bigotry and prejudice alone do not lead to massacres.

The next cause, over which we unfortunately seem to have little control, is the seemingly random occurrence of young men with a pathological disposition toward violent acts. These acts are often simply an expression of mental illness involving isolation, resentment, frustration, sometimes messianic or megalomaniac delusions and even hallucinations. Others seem to be inspired and informed by hate-filled political, religious and racial theories. These are sometimes seen as different from the “suicidal loner” type of killer but they are in fact substantially the same. The difference is that killers like Anton Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, weave a political, historical or religious theme into their delusions. Breivik declared his murders to be a justifiable response to Norway’s immigration policies. Would Breivik have ended up killing dozens of people even if Norway was not accepting immigrants from the Middle East? Would he, like Martin Bryant, the Port Arthur killer, have committed mass murder simply as an expression of his inner state. Probably not. He almost certainly, however, would have found some other cause that he could use as a justification for violence. Breivik led up to his crime, like Haron Monis the Lindt café murderer, with a long period of immersion in political and religious propaganda, both reading and writing it. Extreme racist, religious, political or other social propaganda deals, by its very nature, with fear, paranoia and concepts of superiority and immortality. So, while some mass murderers act without the catalyst of a racist or other extreme ideology, crimes like those of Breivik and the Charleston killer, are clearly, as indicated by their selection of the targets, the product of both a deranged mind and a deranged social doctrine.

But there is still one missing factor. Even the most hate-filled neurotic racist cannot do much harm if they are unarmed. The final component in the equation is weapons.

It is reported that the accused in the Charleston murders was given a 45 calibre handgun by his father for his 21^st birthday. The Sandy Hook murderer Adam Lanza killed 20 school children with a gun provided by his mother.

While it is clear that someone who wants to commit a murder can and will find some sort of weapon with which to commit it, the ease with which these mass murderers have been able to access weapons, some of them high-powered and semi-automatic, is truly astonishing.

Eric Harris and Dylan Kelbold who shot 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999, bought handguns and shotguns from older friends who had bought them from gun shows and private sales. During the massacre, Klebold was armed with a 9mm military grade handgun (originally designed as a submachine gun) with 28, 32 and 52 shot magazines: Harris had a pump action shotgun and a 9mm carbine (also an assault weapon) with 13 ten-shot magazines.  They had no political agenda but seemed to trying to experience a real-life version of a computer game, or Matrix-type movie.

Despite the fact that Jared Loughner who opened fired on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, wounding her and killing six others, was found unfit to stand trial because two psychiatric evaluations found him as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, he was still able to buy a Glock semi-automatic pistol with a 33 round magazine. Loughner was influenced by right wing polemics denouncing "liberal-leaning" politicians. The local sheriff expressed concerns about how the “vitriol that comes out of certain mouths” could affect “unbalanced people.”

In 2012, 20 year old Adam Lanza entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot dead 20 children and 6 staff. Lanza who had problems with sensory co-ordination, had been diagnosed at 13 with Asperger syndrome and displayed obsessive-compulsive behaviour, had drawn up a huge spreadsheet of over 500 mass killings with their respective death tolls. He watched videos about the Columbine High massacres and the Norway attacks. Lanza’s mother was reported to be a "gun enthusiast" who took her sons to rifle ranges to learn how taught her sons to shoot. They had four guns and a safe containing 1400 round of ammunition. He began his massacre by shooting her in the head four times.

A massacre such as the one in Charleston is thus the product of a chain of causes, as clear, and almost inevitable as in the synthesis of a chemical.

1. Take an ideology – that is to say a body of political, religious or other doctrine – that is loaded with aggressive, fearful, and hostile assertions about conspiracies, threats, concepts of superiority or power.

2. Add a disturbed individual, preferably a young man who feels unfulfilled, directionless, isolated, possibly disliked or mocked who compensates for their lack of real achievements by immersing themselves in fantasy literature, games and on-line discussions, delusionary political theories about evil individuals, corporations, governments or races.

3. Finally, give them a gun. Not some single shot rifle or even a six shot revolver. Give them a 45 automatic with an 8 shot magazine or buy some military grade assault rifles and keep them in a safe, but make sure this disturbed young person can easily access it.

What is important is that none of these three factors is any less important than the other two. Improving gun control will do nothing as long as mentally troubled people are being drawn into extremist ideologies. Eradicating those ideologies (even if we could) will not stop those deranged people from getting guns and using them for hate crime.

These are three different social challenges that require three independent campaigns to combat.

So far, American society has no strategy to tackle even one of them.