Leading article: Multiple shootings and permissive gun laws

The mass shooting at Virginia Tech, one of the most respected universities in the eastern United States, is a shocking reminder of the violence that lies so relatively close to the surface of American society. There will, of course, be much soul-searching in the US in the coming days; much insistence, too, that such tragedies are rare and should not brand a whole country or system. And it is true that the particular juxtaposition of the university's reputation for excellence, a campus that exemplified the peaceful groves of academe, and the prolific brutality shown by this gunman make the crime seem especially horrific. It is a tragedy that will mark the university for years to come.

For all the caveats, however, the Virginia Tech atrocity cannot be seen in isolation. It may have taken more lives than any other mass shooting in recent years, but it is unique only in its scale. Shootings at schools, colleges and workplaces take place in the United States with what seems from a European perspective to be appalling regularity. So routine have they become that it is only the multiple shootings that attract national headlines.

Related articles

• The students were told to stay inside. All the while, they could hear gunshots
• Steve Holmes in Blacksburg, Virginia: 'I waited to hear if my friends were safe'
• Police name university gunman
• How schools have improved security
• Rupert Cornwell: Will this terrible day in Virginia be enough to dent America's love affair with guns?
• Massacre on campus: 32 students shot dead at American college
• Search the news archive for more stories

It is hard not to believe that the reasons for the sharp difference in the incidence of gun crime between the US and Europe have much to do with the availability of firearms and attitudes towards their use. Virginia is a state with comparatively permissive gun laws. It would not have been hard for the perpetrator to obtain a gun - or guns - quite legally.

But it would be vain to hope that even so destructive a crime as this will cool the American ardour for guns. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution may mean different things to different people, but the so-called "right to carry" is sacred in many parts of the United States. Especially in the South, it is regarded as a guarantee of personal freedom and a necessary curb on centralised power. "Guns don't kill people," supporters of the US gun lobby like to say, "people kill people".

As indeed they do. The last mass shooting that was in any way comparable, at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, eight years ago, killed 12 children and a teacher. It said something about American gun culture that the two culprits were able to amass such lethal weapons. But it said something, too, about American society - about the frustrations of suburban life, about the pressures to conform, about time, family life and the ruthless competition to "succeed".

It may be premature to conclude that any similar pressures lay behind yesterday's killing spree. If America does not want to learn, however, it is not too late to heed the lesson here. Social pressures and permissiveness towards firearms make for a fatal combination.