Washington: There’s a scene in an episode of House in which the cantankerous doctor, overhearing a colleague discuss a case, listens as the patient’s doting son denies his mother’s alcohol use could be the cause of her symptoms.

An eavesdropping Dr House coughs, turns around from his chair and bellows: “Of course it’s the alcohol!”

Credit: Illustration by Marija Ercegovac

This is a bad analogy because, in the end, it wasn’t the alcohol. But for the past few days, amid the non-stop discussion of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I’ve wanted to adopt Dr House’s tone and scream: “It’s the guns!”

Since Kirk’s murder last Wednesday, the US has been embroiled in something akin to a national panic over politically motivated violence. The axes of the debate? Whether the left or the right is worse, and to what extent social media is to blame.

Barely a word is being said about the prevalence of guns – handguns, rifles, machine guns, you name it – in the hands of this increasingly angry and divided citizenry.

We shouldn’t be surprised. If the US couldn’t enact meaningful reform after Sandy Hook, when 20 children and six adults........

© The Sydney Morning Herald