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When I was a young boy, I was intrigued by what happened when I mixed a small bit of chocolate ice cream with a larger amount of vanilla ice cream. It invariably turned a shade of chocolate. I was fascinated because of the proportions of the flavors. My child's mind just assumed it would all turn white because of the far greater amount of vanilla. Instead, the majority was colored by the smaller part.

So it is with the description of American society as violent. Most Americans are not violent; as adults, very few of us are ever involved in personal physical conflict. Yet, as with chocolate and vanilla, it is the exiguous events that characterize the whole of society. Depending on which statistics are referred to, it can be argued that the US is not particularly more violent than other developed nations. Still, as Monday's bombing at the Boston Marathon seemed to reiterate, we will continue to describe ourselves in the context of atypical events.

This act of terror is not the type of violence that colors our society in any unique way. Bombings have occured throughout the world for a long time: They were a tactic of the IRA and of Basque separatists; they seem a regular occurance in Iraq. In the contemporary age of jihad, Madrid and London have both been the targets of jihadi bombers. Our own history is marked by bombings, most of which had domestic origins (as opposed to international terrorists or saboteurs) and most more lethal than Monday's: The Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886 killed 11; 20 people died in the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910; and the Wall Street bomb attack of 1920 killed 40. Some of the bombings here were the work of ideological fringe goups (Oklahoma City); others. demented individuals (the Unibomber). There was a string of bombings in New York City in the 1950's by the "Mad Bomber", George Metesky, and the 1963 bombing of the church in Birmingham by white supremacists. Violent acts for sure, but singular.

What makes us unique is not, as is often stated in the popular media, gun violence per se. which is far more endemic to many of the countries of Latin America and Africa. Instead, it our special relationship to firearms. The 2nd Amendment give Americans the right to bear arms. Of course, the technology of firearms if far different now then when the Constitution was drafted, and perhaps that is the issue. The carnage wrought in Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, the Sikh temple in Wisconsin or Newtown could not happen if the weapons used were single-shot muskets. As I have written previously, the debate over measures to control the access and availability of firearms is rent by obfuscation and hyperbole from both sides. The NRA, the pitchman for the gun manufacturers, is an obvious culprit, but even advocates of stricter controls delegitimize their argument when they get their facts wrong.  Rather than a an exploration of underlying social issues or a committment to ensuring that we do our best that firearms are mainly in the hands of law-abiding citizens, the debate over gun control is a meta excercise (Quick- what's the difference between as assault weapon and automatic weapon?).

The Bill of Rights is much more than the 2nd Amendment, of course, and we have from time-to-time agreed to place limits on many of these other rights for the sake of the greater good. The right to due process, the right of free speech, the right of assembly- all have been limited by law. Only the 2nd Amendment is deemed untouchable. It is not unreasonable for civil society to place some limit on access to firearms.

Yesterday's failure by the Senate to override the filibuster of the very tepid compromise Manchin-Toomey bill on background checks is emblematic of the dysfunction of the Upper Chamber as much as a refusal to take a even symbolic step towards soothing those frustrated by the events in Sandy Hook and Aurora. As NRA flak Wayne LaPierre is wont to say, "To stop a bad man with a gun, you need a good man with a gun." I would amend that a bit- "To stop a bad man with a gun, you need good people doing the right thing."

The Senate is a little short of good people these days.