Reuters

IT IS surely an American oddity that, after the worst mass shooting in the country's history, some are already saying that such horrors would be less likely if only guns were easier to own and carry. Americans love firearms. The second item in the constitution's bill of rights, just after freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the press, is the right to bear arms. It is part of the national religion.

Mass killings remain rare events, whatever outsiders might think, and they also happen in other countries, including those with tight rules on gun ownership. But life in modern America is punctuated frighteningly often by such attacks. Making any sort of accurate international comparison is tricky, but some attempts have been tried. The International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), an activist group, counts 41 school shootings in America since 1996, which have claimed 110 lives, including those in Virginia this week. IANSA also looks at school shootings in 80 other countries. Culling from media reports, they count only 14 school gun killings outside America in the same period. Putting aside the Beslan massacre in Russia—committed by an organised terrorist group—school shootings in all those countries claimed just 59 victims.

As striking are the overall rates of violent death by handguns in America. The country is filled with 200m guns, half the world's privately-owned total. Residents of other countries may fret that criminals, gang-members and insane individuals are increasingly likely to use guns and knives. But in comparison with America, few other developed countries have much to worry about. The gun-murder rate in America is more than 30 times that of England and Wales, for example. Canada—like America, a “frontier” country with high rates of gun ownership—sees far fewer victims shot down: the firearm murder-rate south of the Canadian border is vastly higher than the rate north of it. America may not quite lead the world in gun murders (South Africa probably holds that dubious title) but it has a dismally prominent position.

What might be done to improve matters in America? The intuitive answer, at least for Europeans and those who live in countries where guns are less easily available, is that laws must be tightened to make it harder to obtain and use such weapons. Not only might that reduce the frequency of criminal acts, goes the argument, but it may also cut the number of accidental deaths and suicides.

Yet some in America are reaching the opposite conclusion. Within hours of the shootings in Virginia on Monday April 16th, a conservative blogger was quoting a Roman military historian, suggesting that “if you want peace, prepare for war” (“si vis pacem, para bellum”). Others put it more bluntly: “an armed society is a polite society”. Virginia's gun laws are generally permissive. Any adult can buy a handgun after a brief background check (as required by federal law), and anyone who legally owns a handgun and who asks for a permit to carry a concealed weapon must be granted such a permit. Yet Virginia Tech, like many schools and universities, is a gun-free zone. Gun advocates are daring to say that if Virginia Tech allowed concealed weapons, someone might have stopped the rampaging killer. To gun-control advocates, this is self-evident madness.

The issue remains one of America's many culture wars, dominated by an uncompromising dialogue between two extreme camps. Western and southern states, libertarians and American exceptionalists believe that guns are part of the national fabric. They say the second amendment is plain: “the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Gun-control advocates note the introductory clause to that amendment, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State”, and say that the framers of the constitution never intended America to be packed with citizens bearing private weapons.

In recent years the right-to-arms camp has been getting stronger. Even Democrats are shifting in favour. The Democratic presidential candidates carried only one state in the south or mountain West in 2000 and 2004, so the party has decided that, to win at the national level again, it must drop support for gun control. That strategy seemed to work in the congressional elections of 2006, when pro-gun Democrats did well. The likes of Jon Tester, a new senator in Montana, and Heath Shuler, a North Carolina congressional freshman, did much bragging about their lifelong gun ownership and support for the second amendment.

This suggests that, though gun laws may be tweaked after the Virginia massacre, there will be little significant change to come. The Columbine killings of 1999 failed to provoke any shift in Americans' attitudes to guns. There is no reason to believe that this massacre, or the next one, will do so either.