Control.

Editor,

Shooting sprees are rare, but gun deaths are not: 30,000 per year in the USA.

American society is strongly polarized politically, with right-wing organizations like Clear Channel and Fox fanning the flames 24/7.

The USA has become since 1980 and is becoming ever more disparate economically, with a small, fabulously wealthy aristocracy reminiscent of pre-1789 France hoarding large amounts of capital and political power, versus a large and growing number of poor, unemployed, and underemployed citizens who feel alienated, powerless and disenfranchised.

American culture is violent. Not music, not video games, not movies; but cognitively: violence -- referred to euphemistically as "force" -- and its cousin coercion, are the problem-solving tools of choice in the American mind.

A military more costly than all the militaries of the rest of the world combined, heavily armed riot police in answer to public protest, bombing, targeted killings, torture, and a litany of other "tools" for getting one's own way are the American approach to a world perceived to be hostile, oppositional, and the assumed province of American power.

Conflict stirs the American psyche to violence: angry words, raised voices, heated emotion, guns.

The mental health problem Americans have is not a few unfortunate, clinically disturbed psychotic individuals. It is a vast population of angry, scared, alienated individuals who feel assured by guns that they control a world they feel entitled to control but don't.

Re: "Enforce the Laws, Don’t Add to Them" (1/17/2013)