Another tragedy - America’s crazy gun culture

LAST week America was numbed — and again divided — by the latest in a long line of school massacres when psychopath Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people, before police shot him, at a community school in Oregon.

An emotional President Obama expressed his deepening dismay that the country’s political system could not work to try to better control private gun ownership and reduce the frequency of these preventable tragedies.

Yesterday that culture-wars tragedy was expressed differently, and almost as tragically, when it was reported an 11-year-old eastern Tennessee boy was in custody for murder for shooting and killing an eight-year-old neighbour with a shotgun because she would not show him her puppies.