Americans have been killing each other for a long time - thousands upon thousands of men, women and children lying in the cold, cold ground from decades of homicidal violence, the bulk of it inflicted with guns. There are street killings here, bedroom killings there - single victims scattered across the daily news. (I saw my first victim 33 years ago this month, a woman shot to death by her estranged husband as she walked across a parking lot.) And then there are the mass killings, a squall of them this spring, with 57 dead within the last month or so, in a handful of incidents from California to New York.
I hear hardly anyone, anywhere expressing much more than a shrug about it.
This is what Scott Simon of National Public Radio wrote on Twitter the day a gunman in Binghamton, N.Y., fired 98 shots in less than a minute, killing 13 people at an immigration center: "Story like NY shootings is soft spot of jrnlsm. We can & should cover hell out of it. But in the end, what does it mean? What is there to say?"
I can almost understand Mr. Simon's shrug. After the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and again after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981, many of us believed the country would turn against guns - assault-style weapons and handguns in particular. But all these years later, we now recognize 280 million as the estimated number of firearms among the 300-plus million inhabitants of the United States. What is there to say? That is a mountain of guns, and it's growing.
Gun sales have been rising again since last fall.
Some say it's because President Barack Obama wants to renew the expired federal ban against military-style assault weapons - the gunman who killed three police officers in Pittsburgh last weekend said as much - so people are stocking up.
But there's more to it. There's a pessimism and cynicism about the kind of society we've become and the uncertain future we face, and that was evident before Mr. Obama took office.
People are stressed about the economy and worried that recovery might be a long way off, and that there may be shortages of food and gasoline, or an increase in crime as the jobless become desperate. So they've purchased guns and ammo, just in case the apocalypse comes before Mr. Obama's economic stimulus package takes effect.
