Across the continent on Tuesday, European media rubber-neck at Monday’s massacre in the United States. Most seem to agree about one thing: The shooting at Virginia Tech is the result of America’s woeful lack of serious gun control laws. In the strongest editorialized image of the day, German cable news broadcaster NTV flashed an image of the former head of the National Rifle Association, the US gun lobby: In other words, blame rifle-wielding Charlton Heston for the 33 dead.

I’m pretty sure Chuck Heston can’t remember what a gun is these days. He’s probably forsaken Second Amendment advocacy for eating garbage and wandering in the nude. I know that’s what I’d do if had Alzheimer’s, but that’s really immaterial.

I don’t blame gun ownership or gun culture at all for this sort of thing. Nearby Washington D.C. has got some of the toughest gun laws in the country and they had to change the name of their basketball franchise because “Bullets” was to Washington what “Brewer” is to Milwaukee…entirely TOO representative of the character of the city. Talk about an inconvenient truth.

All I know about this kid is that he was an English major. Maybe it was that. Four years of sitting through theory about the nature of the phallus and how it relates to “Green Eggs and Ham” and then sitting through a three hour course on deconstructionism and the importance of Toni Morrison is enough to drive a man to murder. Or maybe he was just crazy? Is that so hard to fathom? That, hey, most of us are normal and use pornography as an outlet for our perversions, but maybe, just maybe, there are crazy people who are predisposed to murder, whether it be with an assault rifle or a lethal dose of Nickelback songs.

I can’t believe no one’s blamed Dick Cheney yet. Where has that malevolent fucker been this whole time?