A BIPARTISAN group of senators has rolled out new gun-control legislation that would expand background-check requirements to include purchases at gun shows, but not private person-to-person sales. There may be enough support for the bill in the Senate to overcome a filibuster, and Republicans are divided in any case on the wisdom of blocking debate on the measure. The debate, as it now stands, is quite strange, and tells us a great deal more about the state of the American mind than the advisability of gun control. This round of controversy over the regulation of gun ownership was of course provoked by Adam Lanza's murder of 20 school-children in Newtown, Connecticut. Lanza's guns were legally obtained by his mother, and the proposed expansion of background checks would have done nothing to prevent the massacre. Nevertheless, gun-control advocates have argued for these new measures with save-the-children rhetoric, capitalising on the Newtown calamity. "If even one child’s life can be saved," Barack Obama has said, "then we need to act." In remarks delivered Monday, Mr Obama said, "This is about these families and families all across the country who are saying, 'Let's make it a little harder for our kids to get gunned down.'" He continued, as though from a textbook on sophistry, "What's more important to you: our children, or an A-grade from the gun lobby?"

James Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, has objected to politicians invoking the young victims of Newtown. "I think it's so unfair of the administration to hurt these families, to make them think this has something to do with them when, in fact, it doesn't", said Mr Inhofe. When confronted with the fact that a number of said families have lobbied for stricter gun laws, and think it has something to do with them, the senator replied, insultingly, "Well, that's because they've been told that by the president."

As for the gun lobby, it would like to take our attention off guns. In response to the new background-check proposal, the NRA said:

While the overwhelming rejection of President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg’s ‘universal’ background check agenda is a positive development, we have a broken mental health system that is not going to be fixed with more background checks at gun shows. The sad truth is that no background check would have prevented the tragedy in Newtown, Aurora or Tucson.

The NRA is quite right about the dubious relevance of background checks to these shootings. However it's not at all clear that a better "mental health system", whatever that means, would have done anything to prevent them, either. Closing the gun-show loophole probably would make it "a little harder for our kids to get gunned down", as would greater efforts to prevent and/or contain violent derangement. Both proposals have benefits, and also costs. Will attending more carefully to the potential violence of the mentally ill keep some people who need help from seeking it, due to the fear that they might be labeled a danger to public safety and deprived their liberty? Probably, yes. Will expanding background checks keep some people who urgently need a gun for self-defence from acquiring it? Of course it will. Taking everything into account, is either proposal worth it? It's hard to say, even if we agreed on the relative importance of competing values. Still, if we cared, we'd look into it.

If we cared, we'd look into a lot of things. What Americans have agreed not to look into is telling.

Perhaps the best way to prevent mass shootings is censorship. For example, it could be made illegal to publish any information at all about mass shooters. No names. No pictures. No probing stories about their fraught home lives. Nothing. Maybe it wouldn't work, and mass killers would nevertheless go on to achieve through their evil work the glory of infamy. Then again, maybe it would work. Shouldn't we be willing to at least consider a small abridgement of the first amendment, if doing so would save even one child from a horrific death?

The fact is, most of us would rather lose an abstract kid or two than resort to this sort of censorship. We don't like to admit that, so we tend to deny that it would work. But nobody actually knows it wouldn't work.

Less extreme forms of censorship might also help. There is some research that suggests that, on the whole, violent movies and video-games have no effect on levels of violent crime. Shoot-em-up games may even provide a peaceful outlet for some violent urges! Sure. But these general results tell us nothing at all about the forces in play in particular mass shootings.

James Holmes murdered 12 people last year in a Colorado movie theater that was playing a "Batman" film. His hair was died bright red in homage to the Joker, Batman's mass-murdering enemy. He was inspired by the Joker's terrorising carnage to commit a similar act of his own. To insist that extremely violent American entertainments had nothing to do with this is willfully obtuse. Similarly, Adam Lanza spent a huge portion of his waking hours locked in a blacked-out room playing grisly first-person shooter games. There's even some evidence that Lanza approached his attack on Sandy Hook elementary school as though it were a live-action version of one of these games. At his home police reportedly found an enormous spreadsheet documenting the details of previous mass killings. As an anonymous law-enforcement source told Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News:

“They don’t believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet,” he continued. “This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills. That’s what (the Connecticut police) believe.”

I don't know if this is true, but I do know that it's plausible. Suppose it were illegal to sell and buy violent video-games in America. Would Adam Lanza have fixated on something else? Maybe. Would that have saved the 20 children he shot to death. Maybe. Would it have been worth it? Maybe.

If we cared, we'd try to find out. We'd seriously look into the possibility that the gratuitous violence of American popular culture sometimes inspires unstable personalities to re-enact the enormities they've witnessed thousands of times on their screens. We'd debate whether it's worth trading some freedom of expression for a bit more safety. But we won't. We'd rather not think about it.

What about the children? Who cares?

(Photo credit: AFP)