Pete Buttigieg, a rising politician with a conspicuous gift for coherence, remarked during the debates for the Democratic nomination, “If more guns made us safer, we’d be the safest nation on earth – but it doesn’t work that way.” Yet when I mention him, I often get, “He’s just young and innocent. How can he possibly know much?” Then, when I Google the list of older – and presumably less innocent – United States senators who enjoy the financial support of the NRA, it’s hard for me to credit, considering their consistent legislative inertia, what comes out of their mouths.

One pundit has remarked that purchasing a weapon should be as hassle-free as buying a car. It’s a brilliant idea. Each gun-purchaser would need to show a license that, like his driver’s license, would show proof of skill and passage of a written exam, and list physical restrictions. Each sale would be registered and the title affirmed by the state. Renewal of license, and inspection of each weapon would be required at intervals. And most important would be required liability insurance.

Everybody has an opinion about the causes and cures for our national pandemic of violence. I take a look at who’s shooting people, and come up with a profile: male, white, aggrieved, suggestible, deaf to nuance, contemptuous of “liberals,” threatened by imminent loss of majority status. Has access, for about $1000, to a weapon designed primarily to intimidate, maim, or kill as many human beings as possible in as short a period of time as possible. He goes to a shooting range where, instead of firing at circular targets and scoring his results, he blasts silhouettes of human figures that often face him threateningly. He feels empowered. He feels dangerous. He’s both.

All of us who engage with social media chat with those most congenial to us; so does he. And in that milieu he exchanges feelings with like-minded denizens of the Internet. He reads their rants about the rising tide of other-colored people and absorbs their misogyny. The foundations of white society, the way he’s always known it, are being threatened. He owns a “fantasy weapon,” one that often causes its owner to believe he is the answer to problems caused by people less deserving of life than he. Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha shooter, believed he was serving justice by carrying a fantasy weapon into the chaos of a Black Lives Matter protest.

Of course it can be any or all these things: mental illness, family prejudice, addiction to drugs or violent websites, white supremacy propaganda, xenophobia. But the common factor is the weapon – that sleek, black tool of war, adapted for civilian recreation, that makes a confused, fearful man feel like somebody important. Which, sadly, he often turns out to be.