America's gun culture, fostered by the National Rifle Association, combined with collective anxiety and insecurity lie behind the latest mass murder tragedy in the US, suggests Gearóid Ó Tuathail, who teaches at Virginia Tech.
America, once again, is dealing with the shocking aftermath of a bloody rampage, the "deadliest mass shooting in US history". The horror for me personally is that it unfolded at my university, an institution where I have taught since 1989 and on a campus where I taught for 10 years.
Virginia Tech is not an unusual university in the US. It is a place of learning for the youth of the state and beyond, a place where people from different places and countries come together and are subject to the intellectual and personal transformation that education provides.
That process is sometimes difficult for young men and women, burdened as they are by familial and personal expectations of success that are not always achievable. Most manage their transformation well and adjust into mature adults who find their domain of success.
A few do not, and have great difficulties coping with the process of growing into a different adulthood from what they imagined. What makes these difficulties of the few potentially combustible in the United States is the easy availability of firearms.
Virginia is a state that is home to the National Rifle Association (NRA), an ostensibly non-profit but deeply political group that aggressively lobbies for permissive gun laws throughout the United States.
Virginia Tech is a university founded around a Corps of Cadets led by a veteran of the American Civil War. It has long produced the type of southern masculinity that has staffed the American armies which have fought from the Spanish American War to today in Iraq. The central campus green space is known as the Drill Field and a striking memorial to dead Virginia Tech veterans is at its head.
"God, guns and guts" have long been part of the predominantly white, southern culture of Virginia, and this visceral tradition has been exploited by the NRA, with its close ties to the Republican Party, to elect Republicans to public office in Virginia and across America.
The NRA pushes a particular interpretation of the second amendment to the US constitution, turning it into a charter of personal freedom for young and old Americans to own as many guns as they choose.
As a consequence, the hardware stores around Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech, and in other parts of the state offer a wide variety of firearms. The NRA's political allies uphold their interpretation of the Second Amendment and readily back their ongoing campaigns to undermine and strike down gun control laws across the country.
[The second amendment reads: "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."] In the name of "the security of a free State", a permissive environment for those who view violence as a solution to their personal difficulties is created.
The reasons why particular individuals take this path are varied and complex but the structural conditions and culture which enable these acts to occur with regularity are front and centre in contemporary America. America is ruled by a politician who was elected by placing emotion before intellect in public policy, a self-described "gut player" who sees righteous violence as a solution to insecurity and international complexities.
As it was during Columbine, America is engaged in a divisive war overseas. The Iraq war is embittering the heartland of America as the casualties mount and public accountability is shirked by its leaders. Meanwhile, the crisis-ridden American military desperately advertises to young men using "shoot-em-up" video game montages which play on heroic, militarised masculinity.
The resultant public cultural condition is anxious, insecure, embittered and violent. Developing collective public policy responses to horrific gun violence that places mature intelligence at the heart of public life is something that America desperately needs if it is to renew itself and get beyond its unhinged contemporary condition.
Let's hope it starts immediately.
Dr Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal), a graduate of NUI Maynooth, is professor of government and international affairs at the school of public and international affairs at Virginia Tech.