No Stupid Questions

School shooters usually go after the environment in which they they were abused.

Churches and other temples are usually attacked for religious reasons.

Apart from that a public gathering of many people is the easiest to cause widespread destruction in. An office building isn't as tightly packed and might even have its own security. Plus, if you want to lash out against a corporation you are probably more likely to blame upper management than the general workforce. But targeting specific rich people is even harder and takes more planning.

But also: 9/11 was targeted at a lot of corporations.

Read somewhere they target places that are easy/defenseless/won't give resistance. They target schools, churches, shopping centers, all places with little to no ability to fight back against someone with a gun. Life/society has been cruel to them so they want to return that cruelty to society.

But as someone else said it's not always rational stuff going thru these people's minds.

Mass shooters aren't exactly known for their well-rationed thinking. On a side note, what's up with H.G. Wells??

Availability, and likely the difficulty in reaching the people that are the intended target.

As other people have mentioned, it does happen, but if someone "snaps", they tend to have a fairly specific hate on, and a company is largely going to be about who runs the company rather than the workers, and those assholes are harder to reach.

With churches and schools, the target is more about a group of people being the obsession for the hate/anger/contempt/whatever. You can be relatively certain of killing or hurting muslims if you attack a mosque, christians at a church, etc.

If your assholery is targeted at specific people, you're going to go after where you interact with those people, like schools or your own workplace.

Besides, you're assuming rational thought is in play. That isn't necessarily the case when someone is willing to kill strangers. It actually can be, or at least it's in play with planning sometimes. Luckily, most of the jackasses that decide to spree kill or mass kill aren't good planners, or at least aren't good planners while they're obsessed with whatever drives them to act.

I am still surprised that more of the idiots don't go after businesses. You'd think that there would be more of them with beef against a company and lack any concern over who they hurt so that they target workers they can reach.

Someone did attack the Youtube headquarters several years ago. She was mad they had demonetized her videos.

Because those in power spend a lot of effort distancing themselves from the impact they have and casting blame on everyone else, including on the victims.

A local factory may be poising the locals, paying little in taxes, and exploiting workers on the cheap but they are the biggest employer and its those minorities' fault for some reason and if not that it's the locals' fault for not pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps like their fathers did....

Oh, and look over there, quick! A teacher is trying to groom your kid because he refused to shame that one gay kid in school! Git 'im!

The wealthy assholes who destroy our planet and lives can afford to protect themselves. The other poor schmucks who are getting fucked over too can’t.

How would you get revenge against Amazon? Are you going after Bezos, who is probably on a private island getting sucked off right now? Are you going after the faceless corporate types that work in a well protected office building in a city you can’t afford to live in?

The greatest invention of late stage capitalism is that inaccessibility. On a smaller, less violent scale, you’re ultimately going to cuss out the underpaid customer service rep for the shitty store policy, not the wealthy asshole who made the policy.

Places are symbolic, often institutions by which the perpetrator feels betrayed, excluded, or neglected: school, community, religion, government, society, etc.

As to why figureheads, authorities, owners/elites, and similarly logical representatives are less common targets, I suspect it’s the same reason why smaller acts of violence often target the innocent: primal dynamics behind the cycle of abuse. The hurt/abused are made to feel weak and associate abuse with strength. Unless the original abuser is perceived as newly vulnerable, a weaker target is then sought, and the abuse is perpetuated rather than reciprocated.

It’s helpful to bear in mind, because the most common forms of perpetuated abuse are subtle enough to go unnoticed by most, including various microaggressions, exclusive body language, backhanded compliments, contrarian and adversarial mannerisms, etc. More noticeable are things like verbal insults or threats, bullying, theft, vandalism, and the like, but these are often treated as isolated behavioral problems. Acts of physical violence are of course most noticeable, but are usually preceded by other signs. Anyway, if you notice someone is hurting, or you are hurt yourself, don’t ignore it. We must look out for each other.

Corporations usually have security for the c-suite.

"Why don't the mass shooters simply shoot the corporations?"

It's very simple: your friends work at an Amazon warehouse, but that mosque is full of muslamatic terrorists.

Education and media exposure. All it takes is the right information for things to go south for corporate types.

Are you expecting corporations to tell you about it when they do? They lie blatantly about what happened/is happening and the average person eats it up because the corporate news lied to them about the actual nature of what happened/is happening. We're currently in the epicentre of probably the largest revolt against corporate control since the dawn of the corporation, and most people think it's about every emotionally charged issue that exists other than the actual reason.

Money

sniff ideology

Well..... It used to be called "going postal" because of the frequent mass shootings in postal offices by postal workers...

Why that changed I can't tell you.

On a slightly funny(?) note, postal the game was created where you are in fact going postal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_(video_game)

Apparently there is a plot line that is not about shooting postal workers, so who knows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_headquarters_shooting

Does this count?

If you don't like corporations do your best not to give them your money

They attack those that let them down the most, that they wanted the most from. It's how we all operate really.

Obviously violence isn’t ever the answer

Says who?

what makes their decision to attack something like say a school or a church/mosque

Maybe the right-wing child terrorists perpetrating terrorist attacks against marginalized people are motivated by their politics? Just a guess.