It's so easy to dismiss the horror of Virginia Tech as just another mentally deranged person gone off the deep edge.

But as with wars in third world countries -- and ours in Iraq -- there is a multi-billion dollar arms industry enabling people to be shot by madmen and sociopathic politicians.

Make no mistake about it, the gun industry is a profiteering business. It doesn't look at saving lives, as if it were the Red Cross; it looks at making money.

And it will hide behind Second Amendment malarky, psychologically threatened white males, the myth of self-defense...anything it needs to throw up as a distraction to keep raking in the cash.

America's gun problem is a deeply-rooted symbol of our larger fixation with violence as a solution to challenges that face us. Just look at Bush and the Middle East. In modern times, never have so many sophisticated weapons been used so futilely, with such an enormous cost of lives. The only beneficiaries are the companies that make money off of the deaths of others: the war profiteers.

The gun industry in America is a spin-off of the great military-industrial complex. It's not in the mega-Pantheon of the leeches of death, but it's one of the legs of the stool.

A society that so easily swallows the demented pablum of the gun industry and its shill, the NRA, is one that's doomed to wallow in the blood of its children.