Tom Little- The real insanity of campus carnage

IT WAS the talk of the campus for a day or two, but I pretty much forgot about it as the weeks became months and the months became years. It only came back to me as news came through of yet another mass killing at a US university.

Unlike the slaughter in Illinois on Thursday, the incident back when I was a student had no serious consequences. No one died. No one was hurt. A few people were frightened, but only for a while. There was only really one victim.

He was the student who suddenly, in the middle of a lecture, jumped on to his desk, where he stood for a moment like a great-coated statue, then leapt across the room from desk to desk. I don't recall if he said anything as he hopped about, but this was no "O Captain! My Captain" moment; this was a young man who had lost his sanity. We never saw him again, although I later heard that he recovered after treatment.

Obviously this nearly forgotten incident was nothing compared with what happened when ex-student Stephen Kazmierczak returned to Northern Illinois University (NIU). There, he walked calmly into a lecture hall with a shotgun in a guitar case and three hidden handguns. Within seconds, he had fired 54 times, shooting 21 people, five of them fatally, before turning one of his weapons on himself.

But I didn't need to wait for the authorities to say that Kazmierczak had "stopped taking his medication" a few days earlier to know that, like my former classmate, he was mentally ill. How much more insane was Kazmierczak? Clearly, much, much more – and yet NIU staff described him as a "fairly normal, unstressed person". Police chief Don Grady said: "There were no red flags. He was an outstanding student" who was "revered" by tutors and students.

More details will emerge, although I suspect we will never really know what spark turned this "revered" ordinary student into a killer. But what we do know is that he is just the latest in a depressingly long line of young Americans who decide that the only solution to whatever torments them is to end their own lives – but only after taking as many people with them as possible.

What could possibly cause such insanity? Famously, Brenda Ann Spencer's only answer when she shot 11 people at a San Diego elementary school in 1979 was that she didn't like Mondays. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris more cynically sought fame when they killed 13 at Columbine High School in 1999. It worked – they made the cover of Newsweek twice, while John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King graced it only once. The Columbine massacre has been cited after every atrocity since, such as when Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 at Virginia Tech in April and Robert Hawkins massacred eight in a Nebraska mall in December.

Columbine is a convenient reference point, but you don't have to be a psychologist to see that only two things link such killings: the self-evident mental illness of the perpetrators; and the ease with which US gun laws place weapons in such unstable hands. And this is where the true insanity lies.

You may have heard this before, probably the last time a bunch of kids was slaughtered by a gun-wielding maniac, but it is worth recapping: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms says there are more than 200 million guns in America – there may be as many as one for every man, woman and child; 14,000 people were killed by guns in the US in 2005, compared with 50 in Britain; of every 10 handguns sold, four change hands without background checks.

You get the picture. The last time this newspaper spelled out such statistics we fell into the sights of America's gun nuts, who inundated us with complaints and questioned our figures (all culled from official US sources). They will doubtless do so again today. Again, this is the true insanity behind America's spree killings. How else could you explain the response of some to the Virginia Tech murders – that they would have been averted if more students carried guns, as God-fearing bystanders could have taken out the shooter?

This madness extends far beyond internet chat rooms and meetings addressed by Charlton Heston. When Grady addressed the world's media, he took care to stress that all of Kazmierczak's weapons had been purchased legally. "Don't worry," he might as well have said, "five innocent folks may have died here – but there was no breakdown in the law. The system works!" Incidentally, Grady is chief of police not for a city or state, but for NIU; in right-to-bear-arms America, universities need their own armed police to keep order.

Almost as predictable as Grady's response is that of politicians. Ever since Michael Dukakis was monstered as 'weak on crime' in 1988, no serious presidential candidate has been prepared to take on the National Rifle Association and right-wing America's interpretation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.

But what about the man who so clearly epitomises change in 2008? Barack Obama appeared to break cover in the wake of the NIU killings, which happened in his home state. He declared that America must offer "our determination to do whatever it takes to eradicate this violence from our streets and our schools; from our neighbourhoods and our cities." But within an hour he made it clear that he nonetheless supported the right of individual citizens to bear arms.

It seems that America will not wake up to its insanity on this issue until most of its citizens' lives have been tragically touched by guns. The way things are going, that might not be too far off.