The Connecticut massacre coincided with a debate on torturing prisoners taken in "the war on terror," occasioned by Zero Dark Thirty, a new film on the killing of Osama bin Laden. Perhaps it is more than coincidence. Torture was long used by US police in interrogating those suspected of crime. In the films of the 1930s and 1940s, it is termed "the third degree."

Today, civil liberties organizations are engaged full time seeking redress for excessive uses of force, while the courts give the police a very large amount of discretion in deciding what is permissible.

It is common to trace this to the experience of the frontier, where manners were raw, codes of conduct stark, and Indians plentiful. The frontier, however, turned from reality to memory to myth by the beginning of the last century. It was part of the military expansion of American power, which began with the war on Mexico in 1846-48, continued with the war on Spain in 1898, and included any number of incursions into Latin America as well as the advantageously timed entries into the two large wars of the 20th century.

Preparation for nuclear war with the former Soviet Union and China, actual wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans and the Mideast, and the stationing of US forces in so many countries that the secretaries of defense themselves cannot recite the list, have followed.

Equally, covert action which is hardly covert, the organization and sponsorship of war by clients and allies, as in the backing of Iraq against Iran, are matters so routine that criticism seems utopian. The idea of a nation surrounded by enemies was not derived from September 11 attack of 2001, but was confirmed on that day in the minds of many citizens. 

The struggle against domestic crime was and still is a poorly disguised campaign to keep immigrants and racial minorities under control. A perverse interpretation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which legitimated arms for public purposes like local militias, allows individuals to accumulate personal arsenals. There are as many guns in the nation as people. The result is a large amount of armed domestic violence. The Connecticut killer murdered his mother with her own guns before going to the school. 

The militarization of large parts of US culture, vicarious for many and especially its most stridently bellicose politicians, professors and publicists, is part of a general legitimating of violence. When Bin Laden and several of his family were killed by US special forces, who did not attempt to capture them for trial, crowds outside the White House chanted "USA! USA!" as if at an Olympic event. 

A certain kind of patriotism has merged with a cult of manliness and hardness. The most severe criticism many American politicians can make of presidential foreign policy is that it is insufficiently aggressive. In his presidential campaign, Mitt Romney resorted to embarrassingly primitive imagery.

Despite strong church, familial and neighborhood institutions in much of US society, mutual caring and solidarity must contend in US culture with a cult of self-reliance. Like vicarious militarism, it is more fiction than fact. The states that vote Republican are largely net recipients of federal funding. Their citizenries are dependent on the rest of the country, but it does not prevent them from resenting their supposed lack of responsibility for themselves. 

These are matters of social atmosphere and belief. Institutions and politics are also involved. President Barack Obama considered that in his first term, he had enough to do without challenging the very powerful lobby favoring a free trade in firearms, and its obedient legislators. Perhaps the president, who has good reason to fear the one third of a nation which considers him illegitimate, was thinking of his own family's safety.

The provision for mental health in communities and schools is hardly a model of preventive healthcare and the cure of souls in US churches leaves many out. In this setting, the individual pathologies inevitable in a complex and changing society in which many struggle and fail to find fixed places generate enough hatred for multiple murders. That is what we have had.

As the nation mourns the dead children and teachers of Connecticut, few have evoked the wedding parties and familial reunions in Asia on which US drones have wreaked havoc. Understandable: The country is preparing for the next domestic horror.

The author is an emeritus professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn