I'm taking a guess at what the OP meant, but people focus on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. Supposedly most incidents and deaths are caused by handguns. They're more affordable, and easy to discretely keep on your person. A data-driven policy would focus on them first, but it's easier to rile up the public about AR-15s so we keep doing the less-effective thing.
> Making $80k a year is a GREAT salary. That’s going to invoke a hearty yawn from many when comparing to dev salaries.
I'd like to draw a distinction here:
$80k is very good, by the standards of what most people can get.
$80k is middling-to-poor compared to how fast the cost of living is going up. Housing prices are skyrocketing, people have no savings, can't afford emergencies.
The economy is leaving people behind. In my area, SWE pay moves closer to "normal difficulty" every year, while everyone else moves to "hard".
Once when working in devops I asked my team lead why we didn't just move everything to Heroku, rather than reinventing a bad in-house version of their features.
I was firmly told not to suggest it again unless I wanted to put all of us out of a job.
That seemed ridiculous to me — we had a laundry list of ways we could help the business if we got basic platform stuff off of our plates. But I sure learned something about how incentives affect otherwise-good engineers.
Quick note that depression isn't simply "I'm unhappy" (existence of a negative feeling). Depression is characterized by many/all feelings being severely diminished or completely absent. People who think everything's going right in their life still get depressed, and it's something of a trope for some depressed people to wonder how they can be depressed when they can't point to anything in their life that should be depressing.
While lack of human connection can be one cause or contributing factor for depression in individual cases, and may make a lot of people "depressed" in the informal coloquial sense, the notion that major depressive disorder across the spectrum and across society is singularly caused by lack of human interaction (or singularly caused by anything at all) is not a notion evidenced by any literature on depression I'm aware of, and is not a notion espoused by any of mental health professionals I've encountered who routinely successfully treat people with depression.
I have had treatment-resistant major depression for eight years. During that time I have had long periods with extensive, frequent social interaction and bonding. My depression encompasses most of the time I've known my now-wife, repairing a broken relationship with my father, the acquisition of one new close friend, and the coming and going of many transient relationships.
I don't know what the cure for my own case of depression is, and I'm sure if I were isolated/disconnected my condition would be worse, but the evidence available to me indicates that simply connecting with people is not what's going to fix me.
My wife and mother-in-law are both counselors, and routinely successfully treat people with depression. They have never indicated that level of social connection is either a dominant cause or reliable treatment for depression.
If you want something to read up on, a very popular treatment methodology for depression is CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). The premise is that depression is often caused by harmful thought patterns about yourself or your life, and CBT trains you to arrest those thoughts and replace them with thoughts that are constructive or more accurate (less exaggerated, etc.). It's not the treatment I need, but it works for an awful lot of people, and its solution isn't built around social connections (though it may reveal social connections as a problem in individual cases).