It says something about us, something unnerving, that the general response to mass murder in Plano seems to be a stale round of oversimplified bickering over guns.

With the slowly spreading realization Monday that this carnage was almost certainly linked to a marital breakup (no radicalized Muslims; no unauthorized immigrants to get everybody worked up), there was nothing to talk about but firearms.

Opinions from the twin extrusion holes of the political sausage machine come in only two flavors: Either guns are the agents of Satan and all Texans worship at their infernal altar, or chumps who don't go locked and loaded to neighborhood football parties are just asking to be slaughtered like sheep.

That's it? I'm still struck numb over the mass murder part, the scenario in which an ostensibly sane adult is so swept away by rage that he slaughters as many people as he can gun down before the cops get there.

The notion that all it takes is an injured ego for the guy next door to murder eight people is as frightening to me as an act of political terrorism. It's random, unhinged. It feels like chaos.

1 / 6Plano police and the Texas Rangers work the scene of the shooting on Monday morning. (David Woo / Staff Photographer) 2 / 6Plano police and the Texas Rangers work the scene of a shooting at a home in the 1700 block of West Spring Creek Parkway in Plano on Monday.(David Woo / Staff Photographer) 3 / 6Plano police and the Texas Rangers at the scene of the shooting. (David Woo / Staff Photographer) 4 / 6Police work the scene of the shooting late Sunday.(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer) 5 / 6A police investigator takes photos at the scene of the shooting.(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer) 6 / 6People watch as police work the scene of a mass shooting.(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer)

The woman who lived in the home on Spring Creek Parkway was reportedly hosting an NFL watch party for friends when her estranged husband showed up with a gun. He killed her and six other people and wounded two others before being shot by Plano police. One of the injured people later died, police confirmed Monday.

Why? According to Debbie Lane, the mother of the home's resident, identified Monday as 27-year-old Meredith Hight, the gunman was angry over the breakup. Court records show that Hight filed for divorce from her husband in July; Monday would have been their sixth anniversary.

He was mad, I guess: Mad at the breakup, mad that she was hosting a cookout and watching football and having a good time, mad that life was not going the way he wanted it to.

"He didn't take it well," said the grieving mother, in an understatement surely prompted by shock, in a television interview.

Yes, we have a gun problem in this country, starting with the fact that we are unable to have a sensible conversation about guns without losing our minds.

We also have an anger management problem. We have a rage problem. We have some serious problems with impulse control.

It's that poisonous symbiosis of anger and loaded weapons that can make our society feel like a war-ravaged minefield, where routine family problems and everyday grudges and neighborhood grievances can explode in gunfire.

Lost jobs, messy breakups, thoughtless drivers who cut you off in traffic: These are not pleasant things. What kind of person believes, even for a second, that they justify murder?

"A crazy person" is the response that leaps to mind, but this isn't about mental illness — not in the technical sense of psychosis. It's about people who meet at least two much more commonplace criteria: They cannot control their anger, and they own guns.

In a widely publicized and promptly forgotten 2015 study, a team of researchers from Harvard, Duke and Columbia universities found that 1 U.S. adult in 10 has both a history of impulsive anger and access to a firearm.

Study participants with impulsive anger were those who agreed with such statements as "I have tantrums or angry outbursts" or "I get so angry, I break and smash things."

How many people do you know who fit that definition? As scary as the headline-seizing threats of terrorism or pandemics or North Korean nukes might be, it's frightening to know a sizable proportion of the gun-owning population — the person who lives down the street or works in your office or, perhaps, is getting divorced from the friend to whose Cowboys-viewing party you're invited — has rage-management issues.

The study suggests that when we talk about keeping guns away from "the mentally ill," we're looking at the wrong population: People with major mental disorders, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, are not particularly prone to violence. Instead, the risk for impulsive gun-related violence rises with much more commonplace complaints — anger, depression, substance abuse.

I'm not pretending to have any blanket answers here. But our culture places a high premium on personal responsibility: Paying your bills, taking care of your family, keeping the lawn mowed and the garage door shut.

We need to make "control your anger" a priority. Unhinged rage should be an embarrassment, not an entitlement.

What happened in Plano is shocking only because of the scale, because there were so many victims in that house. Google "murder-suicide" or "disgruntled former employee " and you'll get an eyeful of how commonplace we find it when someone makes a show of their fury and hurt feelings with impulsive gunfire.

Yes, before you send me that irate message: All murders are not impulsive; all are not committed with guns. But we're awfully quick to write off grievance-fueled gun killings as sad but somehow unavoidable, like lightning strikes.

This is a lot more complicated than being "for" or "against" guns.

It's about a lethal, commonplace syndrome. We cannot trust people who can't manage their own anger to safely manage loaded guns.