It's too easy to say the NRA is at fault here. Let's acknowledge that there are millions of Americans who subscribe to a frontier philosophy -- survivalism, nativism, swift & rough justice, racism, the death penalty, good guys and bad guys -- and the NRA together with the gun industry thrives by tapping into this climate.
One of the more insightful things to observe here, though, is that the U.S. legislators are showing an abysmal degree of cowardice in the way they cave in to the gun lobby which represents a small minority of the country's citizens.