One would have a tendency to believe that any nation, espousing the values of liberty, freedom, free will, and the pursuit of happiness -- and, of which, the governance of that said nation, would appear to be theoretically structured in a way and manner to best produce these good attributes, would, by definition, probably also be a nation with a minimal amount of violence, discord, and uncivility. Yet, in all honesty, America does not actually represent a country in which all is well – demonstrated quite conclusively by the incredible amount of violence perpetuated each and every day within it, both licit and illicit, along with the massive amount of its own citizens that are locked up, and finally by the tremendous disparity between those few that have so much of everything, as contrasted to a significant amount of those that have so little of anything.
One of the problems of being the richest nation that the world has ever known, is the salient fact that the people within that nation, are constantly being bombarded by advertisements, social media posts, and entertainment glorifying the necessity as well as the beauty of certain material assets as being the pinnacle of what it means to be an American – basically demonstrating the point that America is a very wealthy nation – but, we also find that, what often isn’t really stated or said, is that the greatest wealth of this country is mainly in the hands of a small minority of people, that have the absolute best of it. This thus creates the construct, in which those that have little or nothing, feel that their self-worth is basically equivalent to their material possessions, and because they lack that material success, find that this quite frequently breeds, in them, discontent, envy, frustration, and jealousy.
So then, within these American enclaves of poverty and neglect, those that are brought up in such a place, and have no good mentor or moral authority to help them navigate the very dangerous waters that they live within, are going to have a strong tendency to want to even the score, as they so mature, especially when all they have known previously is poverty, lack, and abuse by those that are stronger than them. Further to the point, it would be one thing, if everyone else, suffered from the same sorts of problems that those that have nothing good to call upon so suffer from; but for a certainty, America is, in reality, a very wealthy nation, along with it also being too often, unfair, unjust, corrupt, and discriminatory.
In short, for those that have no hope of honestly earning what they perceive that they want and of which, they picture their life as pretty much being without legitimate hope – then they are going to have a strong inclination to take what they want by any means so necessary, of which, for those that lack a legitimate path to achieve such, they will often turn to various forms of violence or intimidation to accomplish their goals, for this, for them, represents their own storming of the Bastille.