This year, Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day — was marred by a brutal mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, resulting in the death of 17 people.

While unquestionably one of America’s deadliest mass shootings, it is not the first of its kind. Until Feb. 15, there had been 1,624 mass shootings in 1,870 days. Since then, there have been four more.

The question is, why has this problem persisted, despite changes in gun laws?

The Second Amendment states that, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” and gives citizens the right to form an armed “militia” necessary to overthrow the government, should it turn tyrannical. This rule was crucial at the time because the government was created through revolution, and it had to protect the people’s right to fight oppression. This is why the possession of firearms is so closely linked to American ideals of freedom and liberty.

Fortunately, many things have changed since the days of the Founding Fathers. For starters, everybody has the right to vote, and slavery doesn’t exist anymore. Unfortunately, guns have evolved from muskets to automatic rifles, while the laws have not. For conservatives, the Second Amendment is more important than people’s lives in America today.

Because of this, stricter gun laws are certainly important. There is no doubt that the Second Amendment needs to be repealed, or at least reevaluated. But legislative changes can only have a limited effect and cannot be counted on to fully mitigate the problem. To really solve the issue, we need to recognise a more insidious cause of these mass shootings: America’s unabashed glorification of violence, through its media, ideas of toxic masculinity and its foreign policy.

American cultural products — movies, TV shows and video games — unapologetically glorify violence. According to one study, around 90 percent of American children have had some exposure to violent video games, and more than half prefer violent video games to nonviolent ones. As for movies, gun violence occurs, on average, more than twice per hour in the average best-selling Hollywood film. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the National TV Study found that two thirds of all TV shows contain violence, and violent acts occur about every six minutes of program content. This means that by age 18, American youth have witnessed 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence on TV alone.

This is obviously not to say that everybody who is exposed to violence in media ends up becoming more violent. Nor am I using this as an argument against enforcing stricter gun laws, like the National Rifle Association does. All I am arguing is that there must be some reason that so many people are drawn to buying and using guns in the first place — the guns certainly do not shoot themselves — and that a culture that so blatantly glorifies violence normalises guns and makes them more appealing. We know that childhood exposure to violence on screen predicts violent behaviour in the future, and we also know that American media glorifies violence more than anywhere else in the world, so doesn't that warrant some attention? The media industry is no less driven by capitalism than the NRA is, so shouldn't that too be under scrutiny?

Additionally, statistics indicate that not race, not religion and not nationality, but gender best predicts violence. In the U.S., 98 percent of those who commit mass shootings, 90 percent of those who commit any kind of homicide and 80 percent of those arrested for any violent crime are male. If there were even half as compelling statistics against any other social group, far greater attention would be drawn to addressing issues among that group to say the least. There are obviously a wide range of theories to explain these statistics in fields ranging from neuroscience, which blames testosterone, to evolutionary psychology, which blames natural selection. Unfortunately, however, these explanations do not lend themselves to any solutions as they imply that it is part of man’s biological nature to be this way.

An explanation that does lend itself to solutions, on the other hand, is the social psychological one, which argues that males are raised to suppress vulnerable emotions which leads them to become overwhelmed and express pain physically rather than verbally, thus leading to violence. Masculinity is defined in terms of physical strength, aggressiveness and competitiveness, thus constructing something called a real man box, or a set of ideals that men are expected to embody. This model is toxic because it portrays what is supposedly normative and acceptable within the tightly constructed representation of American male masculinity. Hence, if a male does get belligerent and violent, it’s merely a manifestation of a compulsion to conform to these ideals.

Finally, America’s foreign policy is entirely based on violence. Its so-called defence budget is 611 billion dollars, which is more than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France and Japan combined. As of 2015, the U.S. has been at war 93 percent of the time – 222 out of 239 years – since 1776. Most of its wars are justified by the premise of protecting freedom and are glorified by its media, particularly to encourage conscription. For America, wars and violence are completely inseparable from the core values of freedom and liberty that it espouses.

Violence is therefore so central to American culture that it is hardly difficult to explain the unspeakably high numbers of mass shootings. It is time America does what is necessary to put an end to gun violence. Gun laws need to be stricter. The Second Amendment needs to be reconsidered. But something more fundamental needs to undergo dramatic change, and that is American culture’s glorification of violence and its direct link to freedom, liberty and masculinity.