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Never mind semi-autos, consdider the blunderbuss. This was the "assault weapon" of the muzzle-loading era. The funnel mouth allowed more rapid reloading of a quantity of lead balls or other shrapnel by pouring them into the open mouth.

Considering the state of medical care in the pre-penicillin era, it was even more deadly than a modern semi-auto. Nearly every muzzle-loader wound to the torso was fatal, and half of wounds to the limbs became fatal due to infection.

A maniac in the colonial era could have wiped out a church with two blunderbusses, but this never happened. What changed was not the weaponry so much as the modern mind, jammed with ultra-violent images from movies, TV and especially first-person-shooter video games from childhood on.

I beleive the biggest change is in the mass-media virtual promotion of mass killing with the copycat effect.

It is not a change in weaponry, as you correctly say.

It is a change in the mind set of the population.

Look at literature before 1900 in Western Civilization. Everything is considered from a Christian perspective.

Look at literature today (your books a notable exception).

Everything is considered from an atheist/neo-pagan perspective.

>>What changed was not the weaponry so much as the modern mind, jammed with ultra-violent images from movies, TV and especially first-person-shooter video games from childhood on.

The thing that changed in the modern mind was the end of cultural Christianity and its replacement with Humanism. The FPS video games and movies followed from that.

In Humanist ideology, each human is the pinnacle of morality and that is situational. So when some nutjob decides to end his life, the morality of taking 30 innocent people with him is easy: “It’s what I want. I have the means. I will do it because there is no higher authority than me that can touch me after I’m dead.”

Every mass shooter has this basic philosophy, whether they call it Humanism, Existentialism, Nihilism—even Islam is really Humanism with a thin veneer of religion applied to cover the political goals of the ideology.

One of my favourite gun control memes was one I saw in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting that had the caption “Semi automatics have been around for 100 years”, complete with vintage ads and then mentioned that “What has changed?” with pictures of the “Hollywood” sign and images from violent video games.

Part of my gun collection includes a lever action Marlin made in 1910 that belonged to my great-uncle, and for sure that would have been even more a lethal item in the hands of a disturbed person back then.

What changed was not the weaponry so much as the modern mind, jammed with ultra-violent images from movies, TV and especially first-person-shooter video games from childhood on.

And a mass-media that offers instant, persistent, world-wide publicity for the killer.

I’d question just how much more “prevailent” mass shootings are once one considers the population difference from then to now along with the fact that first person shooter games primarily make the perpetrators extremely efficient at acquiring and engaging targets. Then you have a nationally connected instantaneous information system that blares every incident involving 2 or more victims often before its even ended.

There is a huge mass of people now that can disassociate to “game mode” and place shots on target consistently and not be rattled in the resultant chaos. Most of them aren’t evil (though I do think there are more evil roaming now). If someone of Alvin York’s skill set had flown off the handle in 1920 they’d have probably racked up a large body count with a bolt action rifle, but the discipline and economics required to reach that skill level probably weeded out all of the impulsive evil douchebags. Their lack of impulse control probably also got them ensnared into the legal system for lesser crimes long before they could graduate to that level of mayhem too.