You will be hearing a lot over the next few days about the second amendment to the constitution of the United States. It says this: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The amendment, one of 12 forming the bill of rights, was added to the constitution of a frontier society in 1791, some few years before the advent of 9mm automatics, when the word "spree" was still innocent. Equally, the framers and their "well-regulated militia" probably did not envisage a day when 300 million souls would share 300 million personal weapons among them. Meanwhile, though the amendment may represent a sacred freedom for many Americans, it has not necessarily inhibited legislators.
Contrary to myth, in fact, nothing in the constitution prevents the US federal government or state governments from passing laws forbidding the ownership of certain weapons, or from legislating on the way others may be used. Nothing at all. But we'll let that pass.
When the gun lobby emerges from the period of discreet silence customary after a massacre in a school or a college, several things will be said. Someone will seize on the fact that Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old South Korean, was a resident alien, not an American, and then overlook the fact that he was resident in a state with the most lax/liberal gun laws in the US.
Someone else will invoke faith, and torture an argument over personal morality. Bad people kill, they will tell you, and good people defend themselves. The weapons are somehow neutral, even innocent. You have probably heard the cliché: Guns don't kill people; people kill people. The thousands, often children, who die in accidental shootings are presumably more wicked than they realise.
Inevitably, a third voice will be heard. It will summon the spirit of American freedom, pure and simple. It will suggest that since the constitution is the definition of liberty, anything contained in the constitution, however antique, however bizarre, is the essence of liberty. Try that use of the syllogism in your daily life. See where it gets you.
What is it with Americans and guns? Or rather, since only a fool generalises about "America", what is it with some Americans and guns? After so many massacres, there is little point in rehearsing the old arguments, or in rehashing all the statistics which time and again repeat the blindingly obvious correlation, country by country, between gun ownership and gun crime. The American body politic is all but impervious to such facts.
Grant, equally, that no society is immune to a Cho Seung-Hui. The point about Thomas Hamilton and Dunblane, if "point" is the word, is that Scotland once believed otherwise. The truth is you can find monsters anywhere. Harder to find, perhaps, are the sort of hardcore American gun-nuts who wrote unapologetically to the likes of me after the children were killed to insist that they had been "proved" right. They said - and they meant it - that Hamilton had been able to kill because no-one was around to shoot back.
What is it with certain Americans and guns? The successive massacres begin to amount almost to a collective psychological profile. History, the history of the civil war and of the frontier in particular, explains some of it, but it does not begin to unravel the fetishising of firearms, the perpetual escalation, like a longing for the promised Armageddon. Guns, for some, go to the core of their identities, to what it means to be American. The result is that not a single serious politician will risk even speculating that the right to bear arms time and again threatens the right to life.
A colleague was making that important point yesterday. After an event such as Virginia Tech, European journalists fall to wondering about the effect 33 pointless deaths might have on "the gun control debate". As my colleague said, in America there is no debate. Disarmament is regarded as unthinkable: what is there to talk about? The best hope after the Virginia sacrifice, and it is probably a forlorn hope, is that the Clinton-era restrictions on automatic rifles - actual combat weapons - might be restored. Reliable George Bush allowed the law to lapse. Who'd risk facing a duck with less firepower than the US Marine Corps?
Hunting is part of the frontier mythology, of course, a rite of passage for virile boys bonding with their fathers. It is a favourite, all-American image invoked by the likes of the National Rifle Association. Why not? Men shoot small things the world over. The American context is a strange one, however. For one thing, hunting tends not to require some of the weapons some Americans covet. It isn't sporting to machine-gun a deer. Secondly, as a matter of recorded fact, applications for hunting licences have been falling in the US in recent years yet the demand for guns is unabated. Thirdly, think about this: you need a licence to kill a duck, but in Virginia you can acquire a device that kills people with far less bureaucratic fuss. "Gun control", in the commonwealth, is a law restricting enthusiasts to one gun purchase a week.
What is it with Americans who demand such a world? We already know why Virginia Tech matters. It matters because it was the worst, because it broke all the records. The victims became statistically and culturally significant thanks only to physical proximity. So will the next demented killer imagine the bar has been raised on newsworthy massacres? It is hard to believe otherwise.
The obsession with guns is strange, the inability to sustain a meaningful debate about guns is stranger still. A killer's need to be seen as a victim - the spree as "payback" - is odd, but odder yet when it happens amid a prosperity unparalleled in the history of the species. The idea of guns as instruments of justice strikes some of us as bizarre, but not half as bizarre as the belief that firearms are moral arbiters, defining the difference between good folk and bad folk. Then again, who made an icon of a Colt revolver and nicknamed it the "Peacemaker"?
We've been here before, we'll be here again. Meanwhile, I suspect there will be a kind of relief within American public life now that Cho Seung-Hui has turned out to be an alien, albeit resident, albeit a member of the Virginia Tech student body who integrated himself into America's version of democracy with a thorough, psychotic relish. He can still be disowned. He can provide another reason to avoid drawing those lessons that seem so obvious elsewhere in the world. That would be a mistake.
The idea of American exceptionalism is defined, sometimes, as an example of the new world improving on the old. In the patriotic rhetoric of the republic, it offers us "the last best hope of mankind". But that itching trigger finger reminds us of something dark at America's heart, a self-loathing to match all the justified pride. And it is a trait of which some Americans simply refuse to be rid.
Mankind's best hope, I think, is that one dysfunctional nation is not our last best hope.
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