Anything can technically kill anything if you are pedantic and creative enough. But at that point every statement becomes useless. Especially when a work of fiction is concerned.

Yeah, approaching these things with stringed logic breaks them usually. Same goes for vampire reproduction for example. If they turn the people they feed on, how come the world isn’t filled with vampires by now? There should be exponential growth in the number of vampires. Or Dracula needing to sleep on sacred home soil. Does it have to be from his exact crypt? How does he know the limits? Could he dig 1000 meters down and the soil would still work? How does a new vampire find their home turf, if they don’t have a family with a crypt?

You can go on endlessly poking holes, but that just takes the fun out of it. A good level of suspense of disbelief is always needed to enjoy those stories.

Dracula cannot be killed by sunlight. At least in the Bram Stoker novel. He’s out and about during the day quite a bit. What sunlight does, is keep him from changing shapes. Same for garlic, crucifixes and holy water. He can’t stand them and they weaken him, but nothing in the text says they would be fatal. Silver isn’t even mentioned.

I think you’re onto something here, and I think it’s a feature, not a bug. The US have been at war the entire time since WW2, but they usually don’t have a draft. So they need to rely on different methods to motivate young men into becoming soldiers. An integral part of being a soldier is the use of violence to solve problems, usually to the point where you might be expected to kill. If your society sees violence and killing unacceptable you’re gonna have a hard time finding people who wanna sign up to do the killing for you. So you honor your veterans more than any other part of your population, you make movies and games about valiant soldiers fighting for the good cause and step by step you slowly manufacture a cultural climate that says killing and violence are legit means of achieving a goal, sometimes even necessary.

It‘s not one singular factor, like education or better mental health care or the group of people who own them. Sure, those are all important, but they only in part tackle the main underlying issue why people do these things. Young men (and nearly all mass shooters are young men) in american society are told that they are supposed to be achievers, they are supposed to get rich, be cool, have many friends, get a girl, get a house, get a fancy car and all the other status symbols. But most of them don’t see a way of achieving this, since it’s pretty unrealistic with how things are in capitalism. This tension between the life they want and some think deserve, and the life they actually lead is pretty tough to handle.

Most adjust their goals, or get into political activism, or hustle culture, or drugs or do whatever else to get over this perception of a stolen future. But a tiny group can’t get over it and they are angry at society for taking what they think is their rightful life from them. They usually find other people with similar resentments online, radicalise further, and at the end you have a tragedy. Guns aren’t even necessary, they just make it easier to hurt a lot of people in a short time span.

Now Switzerland isn’t socialist heaven, but there is in general a higher standard of living, better education, better mental health care and less demands for young men to become as rich as possible. There are also more strict checks when issuing guns than there are in some us states and strict rules about storage. So a 17 years old will be less likely to develop the toxic ideology needed to want to do something like a mass shooting, have a better safety net to deradicalise him and have a harder time getting the needed equipment.

This is obviously generalising a lot, so don’t take it as a universal answer, because there isn’t.

I personally know a few people who do similar stuff or use it as therapist. It’s anecdotal of course but I don’t think many people using AI for personal connections and interactions is very surprising. Before AI people used chat boards, blogs, social media and google to talk about and commiserate about their problems, now it’s AI. There was an “AI” called Eliza in the late 60s and people already were using that as a therapist and attributed intelligence and real emotions to it.

This whole thing says more about the availability and demand for real human connection and therapy than it does about the individuals who use it.

If you sell it right that could be a hit with all those brexit voters