<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12158148>"Over time, gun ownership has become fused with a particular brand of American identity that prizes rugged individuality and libertarian notions of freedom - mostly freedom from government."
"Mr Webster says that it is common for people simply not to ask why guns are so prevalent or why mentally unstable people can so easily access them.
Instead, he says, their attention focuses on what was wrong with the individual shooter. Did he have a troubled past or a mental illness?
"Our responses tend to be ones in which we punish the offender and try to enable individuals to protect themselves. But we are reluctant to act collectively to make our communities and our country safer," he said."
[WS:] I've never owned or used a gun and this is unlikely to change, but I also think that this focus on gun ownership (on both right and left) is a diversion from real problems. Gun is mostly a symbol in the US, in the same league as, say, a wooden cross with an image of a dead man pinned to it.
Its practicality is close to nil, but it is believed to be endowed with super-natural powers that have a significant impact on a person's everyday life.
It is a symbol of freedom from vices -ranging from government to crime (mostly for the right and gutter populism) - as the above quotation observes, but it also the embodiment of the "master cause" of social dysfunction (mostly for the left and liberals.) I do not think that deconstructing the former is necessary on this list, but the latter places emphasis on gun control and by so doing shifts attention from social dysfunction to what amounts to a fetish. Violent rampages occur in many countries, even though with strict gun control (e.g. in China they use knives instead of guns.)
So bringing up the issue of gun control in the context of a rampage amounts to enacting a magical ritual that gives people an illusion of control and predictability in situations that are fundamentally uncontrollable and unpredictable - just like magical rituals of Trobriand Islanders described by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.
Wojtek