Maybe it isn’t discussed because ARs are also the most common rifle in the U.S., and for at least 10 years now, the cheapest non-22LR. It’s hard to know how much of a role the psychological factors actually play when “easy to obtain” is a significant one of them.

“Easy to obtain” is also the part that is easy for legislation to address, while vaguely defined and hard to measure “psychological effects” requires significant effort just to understand, let alone implement the required social safety nets and induce cultural change to address the root causes.

Yeah, I think that list overemphasises the role of fiction in individual inventions. Most significant inventions have messy histories of iterative development and multiple sources of inspiration with varying degrees of influence. Here is a patent for a taser-like devices that predate the taser and doesn’t use that name: https://www.freepatentsonline.com/3523538.html. It was also invented by a Japanese guy who probably never read the electric rifle book. The later company and commercial product just used the book as loose inspiration for the name.

On the other hand, that last paragraph in the long post undersells the role of fiction in how people’s worldviews are shaped and how it can influence their everyday decisions. I think that’s way more significant than any one invention, but it’s even messier and hard to trace conclusively.

In the past the dangerous morons sent their kids to die in war, and the people who stayed behind were the ones who were more peaceful

Historically, the number of people who have been offered a choice about whether or not their children would participate in a war is vanishingly small compared to those who have not.