School shootings seem like a relatively minor instance of this larger problem:
Scientific and technological progress might change people’s capabilities or incentives in ways that would destabilize civiliza-
tion. For example, advances in DIY biohacking tools might make it easy for anybody with basic training in biology to kill mil-
lions; novel military technologies could trigger arms races in which whoever strikes first has a decisive advantage; or some
economically advantageous process may be invented that produces disastrous negative global externalities that are hard to
regulate. This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable world: roughly, one in which there is some level of technological
development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i.e. unless it has exited the ‘semi-anarchic
default condition’. Several counterfactual historical and speculative future vulnerabilities are analyzed and arranged into a
typology. A general ability to stabilize a vulnerable world would require greatly amplified capacities for preventive policing
and global governance. The vulnerable world hypothesis thus offers a new perspective from which to evaluate the risk-benefit
balance of developments towards ubiquitous surveillance or a unipolar world order.
Basically, what do we do about a maniac who wants to harm us all? Today, the maniac only has a gun. The technology is only going to get more deadly and complex. There will be unintended consequences of technological development that bring more power to the maniacs. So what do we do about it?
If we can't agree about guns, maybe we can all agree about this instead: total surveillance.
From the same paper:
By the ‘semi-anarchic default condition’ I mean a world
order characterized by three features12 :
1. Limited capacity for preventive policing. States do not have
sufficiently reliable means of real-time surveillance and
interception to make it virtually impossible for any indi-
vidual or small group within their territory to carry out
illegal actions – particularly actions that are very strongly
disfavored by > 99 per cent of the population.
https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf