How to Make an American Mass Shooter interrogates the ways in which mass shooters in the U.S. are the product of a deeply and historically nationalistic, xenophobic and racist society that uses the right to bear arms as means of violently enforcing these kinds of beliefs. Miller's focus is to keep people from declaring all shooters mentally ill or deranged, and to challenge the citizen who refuses to believe these values exist and are practiced by the fully sane minds of those living here-to refuse to see these deeply embedded values as the thread that wove the fabric of this country. However the work also serves to remind people that we cannot justify their behaviors by naming the shooters acts an extension of mental illness, because all this does is allow us to believe that revising gun laws and comprehensive background checks, will stop mass shootings that in the words of the shooters stem out of a need to regulate migration and jobs and the shifting of a nationalist viewpoint.
