Rupert Cornwell: A brutal truth: Massacre is just part of everyday life in America

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2458908.ece

It is as if we are on autopilot. The ghastly tragedy swamps the news to the exclusion of all else. There are the heartbreaking stories of a university shattered and of the dozens of victims, their mostly young lives cut short so senselessly. We listen to the grief-stricken remarks of the President, and follow the breathless investigation of the perpetrator's background, his history of mental illness. We share the anguished second guessing about whether his murderous rampage could have been prevented. Yet everything is playing to a script we know by heart.

Virginia Tech, of course, is the worst incident of its kind in US history - and at one level, you would gain the impression from American television that Cho Seung-Hui has literally stopped the world.

He hasn't of course. On Tuesday, in what passes for a relatively quiet news day in Iraq, wire services reported the deaths of 56 people in violence across the country: some of them gunned down, some killed by a suicide bomber, some discovered as decomposed or decapitated corpses. But we heard not a word of that, nor of the trial in absentia in Italy of a US soldier accused of shooting dead an Italian intelligence agent, nor of the report that North Korea may be about to shut down a key nuclear reactor (which would be very big news indeed if true.) And somebody shot dead the Mayor of Nagasaki. But who cares? Instead, nothing but Virginia Tech.

Yet, however exceptional the event, there is something formulaic, even routine, about the coverage. There is no soul searching, no wondering what might be wrong with a society where such things happen so frequently. You hear no new arguments, for deep down there is nothing new to be said.

....are murdered and 68% of those murders are committed with fire arms. By the end of the year 18,678 people will be murdered in America. Next year that number will rise based on both the increase in total population and also through a rise in the murder rate per 100,000 people which has been on the increase by 3% to 5% annually over the past six years.

we like it this way:

easy access to handguns
difficult access to mental health care.

we want to keep sleeping.

since our inception we have known how to take our darker charateristics -- and plunge them into a black pit -- until something comes along that grabs our attention.

the problem from modern through post modern to contemporary times -- events and media have conspired to keep very little buried.

it's a feature of the american character -- something we just never, ever get around to talking about.