The National Rifle Association, America's powerful gun-ownership lobbying group, declares in its motto: 'Guns don't kill, people do.' The slogan is naturally designed to persuade supporters of gun control of the errors of their ways and suggest that, in itself, a firearm is a harmless toy.
One wonders how that phrase rings in the ears of the teenagers who were in the hallway of Heath High School in sleepy West Paducah, Kentucky, on Monday morning. A 14-year-old student walked into a prayer meeting and shot eight fellow students with a semi-automatic handgun.
Three died - including one of the boy's friends, according to reports - and five others were badly injured. Next morning, the local paper ran the headline banner 'WHY?'. We do not yet know the answer, and maybe never will.
In Mississippi, a couple of states to the south, a similar tragedy took place in a high school two months ago when a student ran amok also leaving a handful of students lying in pools of blood. In that case, police have pointed to a cultish group among some of the students that had been planning such an attack.
There is, of course, never a single identifiable reason for such surreal acts of violence: whether the Kentucky killer was an atheist who objected to prayer in school, or was merely miffed at getting a C-minus for maths, the only way to rationalise such horror is to label it irrational.
But, whenever such acts occur, they are by far and away the best rebuttal to the NRA's cherished lobbying cry.