America's guns - a view from a foreigner

In the Guardian today Gary Younge, currently "embedded" in America, explains why even the recent tragic events will do nothing to change American attitudes or laws relating to guns. Here are a couple of paragraphs I found particularly telling (emphasis mine):

"By Thursday CNN was reduced to gleaning insight from the woman who drives the student shuttle bus and screening Cho's rambling rants. They beeped out the expletives as though the swearing was the most offensive thing about their content.

The videos made Cho the source of much revulsion but proved unworthy of moral panic. Some commentators tried to emphasise his Korean birth as somehow relevant to the slaughter. But Cho was made in America, every bit as much as his elder sister who had gone to Princeton. True he was an immigrant, who came to the country at the age of eight. But his parents were "good" immigrants - legal, solvent and self-employed. At home they had been poor. Now they'd put one child through an Ivy League college with money from their dry-cleaning business; their story owed more to Ellis Island than the Rio Grande.