KEY POINTS:
The left-wing American movie-maker Michael Moore may not be to every taste, but his study of the Colorado school massacre eight years ago was a powerful indictment of the forces that have infested so many American households with firearms. The movie is resonating now in the coverage of
yet another student massacre, this time with many more victims at a Virginia university.
It was not confirmed that the young gunman who died with 32 others at Virginia Tech had acquired his weapon as easily as the two teenagers at Columbine High School, but there is not much doubt that he did. Nothing has been done since the Columbine massacre to make it harder for disturbed young people to find a gun and write a chapter for themselves in America's inglorious record of campus slaughter.
The dead killers of Columbine and Virginia Tech join the student who climbed an observation tower at the University of Texas in 1966 and killed 15 people, the Chinese student denied an academic honour who opened fire in two buildings on the University of Iowa campus 16 years ago, killing five employees, the University of Arizona nursing student and Gulf War veteran who shot three instructors in 2002, the graduate student at Virginia's Appalachian School of Law who killed the dean, a professor and a student, and several more.
When guns are used at places of learning it is particularly tragic. Education should be the antithesis of violence. Schools and universities exist to encourage civilised expression and impart the knowledge, understanding and skills needed to engage in reasoned argument. They are the last places families should have reason to fear for their children's safety.
Yet so many of those families in the United States seem to have firearms at home, and not for sport. The guns that feature in campus shootings are not generally hunting rifles and the like, they are handguns and even semi-automatic assault rifles. They are for killing people, nothing else, or as their owners would say, for self-defence.
The movie Bowling for Columbine was an insight into the fears of Americans, or white Americans anyway. Its conclusion was that white Americans are instilled with a fear of black crime that is out of all proportion to its incidence. They keep their doors locked at all times when they are at home and fear to enter a predominantly black area of town. They receive a constant diet of crime, mostly black, on television news programmes and live in terror of it.
If they notice that whites are rarely the victims of black crime, they probably put it down to having a gun in their homes. It is a tragedy of American life that the weapons they believe they need for protection so often become instruments of death for their loved ones. Their children's classmates may come from well-to-do homes where handguns and ammunition, easily purchased over the counter in the US, may be kept unlocked and readily available.
The latest youthful massacre has taken the largest toll. It would be a consolation to believe that this time, at long last, Americans may rethink their constitutional right to bear arms, but it seems unlikely. The National Rifle Association will argue as always that people, not guns, are the problem, and that a disarmed population cannot be "free". But the gun lobby is only as powerful as most Americans want it to be. They cannot be convinced that fear is their worst enemy. Fear is the only reason they continue to harbour the weapons of their own destruction.