Every day during breakfast the old man turned on the kitchen radio to get the latest news from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. On Monday mornings, between bites of bacon and eggs and biscuits with ribbon cane syrup, I remember being struck by the number of shootings in the two cities over the weekends. It was my introduction to the notion that a different culture was ascendant in Texas, compared to the relative somnolence of my home town in central New York. In recent years that impression has been confirmed by references, during conversations with Texans about various heinous crimes, to something known as “Texas Justice,” an obviously extra-judicial shortcut to appropriate punishment, either capital or disfiguring. If you admire John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, it’s right up your alley – though I doubt it’s dispensed with the usual bons mots provided those heroes by the screenwriters.

The recent rampage by a disturbed and disgruntled ex-student at a Florida high school has set aflame the news media and the Internet. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that it was a terrible act (again, pundits and anchorfolks are scrabbling for adequate adjectives). And the one thing almost no one agrees on is why it happened. Was it the easy availability of a rapid-firing military-style weapon; a case of psychosis that should have found its way to appropriate counselors; the bungling of preventive law enforcement; violent films and video games featuring murder and rape; or the general degradation of society that’s been accelerated in recent years by the absence of God in our schools and homes? Take your pick. If you’ve got room in your head, take as many as you need. There are dozens more.

Most of them, if not all, have, I suppose, some relevance to the critical problem of mass shootings. But I find myself returning ineluctably to the notion of culture as a determinant in violence. We’ve never quite shucked the image of ourselves as bold frontiersmen. If we have a problem, we tend to shoot it; and our manly heroes tend to be fantasies: lone wolves who push the boundaries and fetishize certain weapons. Dirty “Make my day!” Harry, for example, carries a huge long-barreled revolving cannon that somehow never misses. When we see him removing it reverently from its case and loading it carefully, we know that the major conflict of the drama is about to be resolved. Rambo, on the other hand, moves through the jungle like a malevolent goblin with a rapid-firing assault weapon. He rarely wears clothes, so it’s difficult to see where he might be carrying all the ammunition he detonates. We’ll let that go. The serious-faced local guy wearing a semi-automatic sidearm in Price Chopper has similar fantasies, but most likely hasn’t the faintest idea how much an attorney will cost him if he actually does shoot a bad guy. And he’d better hope the decedent doesn’t have a litigious family. The OK Corral culture I noticed first on the 1954 Dallas Monday morning news has pretty much spread across most of the country.

The most recent school shooting may turn out finally to be the beginning of meaningful change. The victims this time were high school kids, whose surviving friends are sick of feeling like targets, tired of prayers and thoughts, are almost of voting age, and possess mass communication skills that a congressman can only dream of. Across the country – if they can keep it together – they’ll be asking their representatives explicit questions about their sources of financial support and publicizing the answers. I wish them well.

The AR15-like rifle popularly known as an assault weapon, the one used in the recent shootings, has no legitimate place in a civilian setting. Its design purpose is to kill as many human beings as possible in the shortest possible time. Like Dirty Harry’s revolver, it’s a fantasy weapon, sometimes called a “street-sweeper.” Weak-minded, impressionable young men, their imaginations inflamed by dipping too often into the more malignant waters of the Internet, fancy themselves stemming the tide of integration, helping to make America great again, or just getting even for slights, real or imagined. We need this because?

Australia had it right: Stop the sales of the weapons (the lawyers can refine the specifications); perform a massive and generous buy-back (the NRA estimates there are about 8 million in circulation); stop production of the ammunition, and criminalize its home manufacture.

Most of all, we need to get over the fantasy of the armed good guys and bad guys. In the photo of Ronald Reagan just before he was shot, he’s surrounded by five or six trained good guys with guns. And if we can’t give our next generation a safer nation, at least we can help them secure it for themselves.