When 14-year-old Juan Ramon, of Halthom City near Fort Worth, got angry after a family row, he didn't kick the family dog or sulk, with a family rifle (a Chrismas gift from his father) ready at hand, he started shooting. He shot a dog and seriously injured three neighbours, before killing a cop who had answered an emergency call. Later, Juan was killed in a hail of police bullets.

Juan Ramon's weekend shooting spree was quickly followed by several other shooting deaths in the state -- all within weeks of the Feb. 28, 1993 shootout at the Branch Davidian sect's compound near Waco. In the Lone Star state, the national capital of gun culture, such stark tragedies are nothing unusual. Texas has a population of about 17 million. Between them, they own 86 million guns -- or four guns for every man, woman and child. Texas has no gun registration laws and guns can be easily purchased everywhere in the state. Not surprisingly, thousands are being cut down by gunfire every year in Texas.

Recalling also the 1991 massacre at Luby's Restaurant in nearby Killeen where a deranged man armed with an assault rifle shot dead 22 people, the paper wrote: "These high-profile slaughters are sickening. But are they really any more so than the slow-motion mayhem going on in virtually every city?

"A steady drumbeat of violence plays itself out daily, felling our fellow citizens one by one... But society seems to cruise along, largely oblivious to the depth of the problem, until one of these mega-events occurs and then society goes ballistic."

While these observations are largely accurate, society going "ballistic" for gun control may be a pious wish. For most Texans, these bloody shootouts are essentially freak shows -- something scary happening to somebody else. Somehow they fail to relate events like Killeen and Waco directly to their own lives and habits, any more than they do the routine bloodshed on the streets of Dallas and Houston. Perhaps this is because they don't understand or don't care. But perhaps the deeper truth is that given the enormous pressure exerted by the gun lobby, Texas doesn't really want to change. Or, as Harold Dutton, a state legislator, remarked: "In Texas, we have this idea that we can mess with my wife and my dog, but don't mess with my pick-up or my rifle." Far from going ballistic in favour of gun control, Texas passed a bill allowing Texans to carry concealed handguns.

The indifference over what to do about the anarchic proliferation of guns is not confined to Texas. In Washington, the Brady Bill (a modest gun control measure named after Ronald Reagan's press secretary Jim Brady who was maimed in the 1981 assassination attempt) was allowed to expire by the earlier Republican-dominated House.

Even after the bloody shooting at Virginia Tech, there is no serious attempt at gun control. Gun lobby's favorite plea that guns don't kill, people kill people is transparent sophistry. In fact, people with guns kill people. Without guns, it would have been impossible for a lone gunman to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech. Gun lobby's another contention that gun control only penalizes law-abiding citizens is patently false. Cho Seung-Hui was a law-abiding citizen before the shooting.

But the American political classes remain oblivious to the depth of the problem stemming from the anarchic proliferation of guns in America. As such, the more likely outcome may be that the every day, slow-motion shootouts will continue across America -- and that there will be more Killeens, Columbines and Virginia Techs. Australian Prime Minister John Howard touched the crux of the problem while commenting on Virginia Tech: "We took action [after a similar massacre in Australia a few years ago] to limit the availability of guns and we showed national resolve that gun culture that is such a negative in the United States would never become a negative in our country."