America, how long will you sacrifice your children on the altar of gun worship?

This devotion to the right to bear arms is horrifyingly outdated. It brought terror to Texas — and it will happen again and again, writes Jonathan Freedland

A woman reacts as she pays her respects at a memorial site for the victims killed in this week's elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Picture: AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills

America's great appeal to the world was its promise of possibility. It presented itself as virgin territory, a tabula rasa where a society could form anew, free of the past, and where individuals might do the same, reinventing themselves, renewing themselves, starting over. 

It was a myth, of course: it took no account of those people who were already there, and whose lives and lands were taken, or of those who had been brought to America in shackles. But it was a powerful myth all the same, one whose grip on the global imagination lives on: Witness the success of the stage show Hamilton in seducing yet another generation into the romance of a new world and its revolutionary creation.