A paranoid defense contractor carried out the Washington Navy Yard shooting that killed 12 people in 2013. We don’t yet know what motivated the gunman in Dayton, Ohio, to kill nine and wound 27. But in 2014, a 24-year-old man named Elliot Rodger killed six and wounded 14 in California, to express his rage at women for perceived sexual rebuffs.

This menu of atrocities offers a wide range of political points to score, if that is your wish. You will find here immigrants and natives; whites and nonwhites; Muslims and Christians; right-wingers, left-wingers, and the nonpolitical. There is even a woman, Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, targeted a Christmas party sponsored by the local Department of Public Health, where the husband worked.

Despite their diversity, all these killers had one thing in common: their uniquely American access to firearms. In turn, these killers unite the country in a uniquely American determination to ignore the obvious.

White nationalism is emerging as a deadly international terrorist movement. El Paso is only the latest in a line of killings. Yet 48 hours before the El Paso mass shooting, the Italian interior minister erupted in a racist tirade against Roma people. It was not a first offense from Matteo Salvini, an admirer of President Donald Trump. Italy has a lively far-right political movement, which stages public demonstrations to honor Benito Mussolini. You know what it does not have? Mass shootings.

Like Islamic extremism, white nationalism is a dangerous internal political threat to democracy. Like Islamic extremism, white nationalism extends across borders, targeting isolated and angry young people for online radicalization. Like Islamic extremism, white nationalism can turn murderous even in countries—Norway, New Zealand—where guns are rationally regulated.

Like the threat of Islamic extremism, the specter of white nationalism summons Americans to defend their institutions and values against a repugnant, violent ideology. But it is not because the U.S. is uniquely afflicted with either Islamic extremism or white nationalism that it suffers vastly more gun deaths than the rest of the developed world. America’s uniquely bloodstained record of violence is a consequence of America’s uniquely reckless attitudes toward weapons of mass death.

More guns, more killing. Fewer guns, less killing. Everybody else has figured that out. Americans—and only Americans—refuse to do so.