Twelve shot. Nine dead. So far. The sniper who is terrorising the suburbs of Washington DC, and on Saturday as far afield as the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, 85 miles south of the capital, has touched a terrible raw nerve.
Yesterday, two arrests raised hopes in communities becoming increasingly paralysed by fear. But, earlier, some 200,000 Virginia school students were told to stay at home. Their safety could not be assured. Last week, school football, soccer, and baseball associations had already ordered students indoors. Public spaces are deserted. Open-air events are being cancelled.
In the supermarket carparks, the more nervous run from their cars to the shops, or pull up to the door in their SUVs to allow the supermarket staff to load their shopping directly. Even filling up at the petrol station is now done furtively, with an eye to cover.
Statistically, the average person has a better chance of winning the Maryland state lottery than being shot. But fear is infectious and immune to rational dissection. For many the sense of vulnerability, fed by the apparent motivelessness of the killings and the conviction that the sniper is probably one of their own, is worse than the aftermath of September 11th.
Yet there is a paradox here. America is a society all too used to gun deaths - over 30,000 die each year in gun-related incidents. In Maryland alone, the figure is in the hundreds. There are some 192 million guns in private hands in the US, 65 million of them handguns.
The political system, well-oiled by the hugely wealthy National Rifle Association (NRA), protects individual gun ownership in the name of a dubious interpretation of the Constitution's guarantee that "a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." And even as the sniper goes about his bloody carnage, President Bush has intervened in the debate to oppose the establishment of a "ballistic fingerprinting" national database to keep track of individual guns. His spokesman argues that it would be unconstitutional and akin to fingerprinting every citizen to catch a few thieves. And many fear that an Administration deeply wedded to the gun lobby will be unwilling to uphold the ban on the sale of semi-automatic assault weapons, enacted in 1994 and due to expire unless renewed in 2004.
When will this mad love affair with the gun end?