Last week's mass slaying of 26 schoolchildren and teachers in a Connecticut elementary school has cast a familiar pall over the nation. While particularly gruesome because of the setting and age of the victims, these killings are only the most recent in a series of similar incidents.

The media conversation will focus on the event's sensational devastation and also recycle arguments about gun control.

The liberal side of the debate contends that guns should be more heavily regulated in the US, where it is relatively easy to purchase many types of firearms. Opponents argue that such regulation would infringe on the basic rights of Americans without making the society any safer because individuals use guns to protect themselves from all kinds of crimes.

These arguments will be inconclusive, yielding little or no change in the law. One reason is the substantial power of the gun lobby. The National Rifle Association is one of the country's best funded non-profit groups, with annual revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

As with abortion rights or gay marriage, a significant minority determine their voting practices according to this issue.

The implications of the issue, however, go far deeper than partisan politics or voting statistics. The conversation about gun rights and the event which inspired it express important underlying problems of US society.

In a number of fundamental ways, this kind of gun violence is connected to the structures, institutions, and ideology of the US. In particular, mass killings and our reaction to them represent Americans' fraught relation with public power and individual rights. 

Over recent years, disinvestment in the public sphere has left many Americans outside the structures which might inform their lives in a positive way. Such disinvestment is particularly hard on the poor, the elderly, and the disabled. Medical services for the mentally ill have suffered funding cuts across the country. While all the information about last week's killing is not yet available, we can see the impact of such disinvestment on similar events.

For example, when Jared Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 other people in 2011, it soon became clear that his long-standing and severe mental illness had been ignored by the various institutions with which he interacted, including high school, the police, the army, and college.

In particular, Loughner's problems had been obvious at the community college he attended. Teachers and staff at such institutions are notoriously underpaid and overworked as a result of decreases in public funding for higher education over the last 30 years.

In Arizona, this situation is worse than elsewhere, in part because the University of Phoenix, a large corporate university, has engaged in legislative efforts to limit public education in the state.

In short, the kind of college that Loughner attended had no ability to deal with someone with the mental problems he experienced. Only after the mass murder would the state or the community focus their attention in his direction.

Americans' systematic disinvestment in their public institutions is the economic expression of individualist ideology, the idea that meaning and value are found solely in the individual.

According to this view, public institutions inevitably degrade individuals' lives, like the long lines you encounter when trying to renew your driver's license at the department of motor vehicles. And gun ownership is one of the most powerful symbols of this ideology.

Many advocates picture this right as the final safeguard of the individual's ability to ignore and exist outside of the public sphere, beyond the ability of law or bureaucracy to interfere. So in a sense, mass killings like the ones at Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown are only an exaggeration of a usual type of thinking: a man alone, acting outside the law, attacks a primary social institution, a school or a movie theatre. 

Americans' love for these ideals is the reason that the media cannot generate meaningful understandings of such events.

At the same time, publicly displayed concern allows pundits and audience alike to feel exonerated in their rejection of community and attachment to violence.

The media attention is actually a way of ignoring the wider problems, a manifest distraction from the implications that such events have for US culture.

The author is a PhD candidate in Ohio State University. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn