Editor’s note: The US has experienced a terryfying week over the Boston bombings, killing three and injuring 176 others. Americans continued to be shocked by the “bad news” that the Senate has just rejected the gun-control legislation backed by President Barack Obama. American journalist Scott Harris wrote in his exclusive article to Tuoitrenews that there are some relations between the two events.

The news just came in as I write these words: The second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing case has been captured alive, wounded and “in serious condition.”  He is 19 years old, a Chechen immigrant from Russia whom former classmates had described in positive terms. His older brother, who is 26, was killed during the manhunt after the killing of a university security officer.

“CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over,” the Boston police announced on Twitter. “The search is done. The terror is over.”, 

For the moment. Terror, American style, is a complicated, chronic subject. But the arrest brings some relief to what had been a truly awful week back home America.

An interrogation might lead to possible accomplices, in the U.S. and abroad, and a motive. What is it that compels people to detonate home-made, pressure-cooker bombs in a crowd? These were designed to maim. Three people were killed by the two blasts, including an 8-year-old boy who was there to watch his father finish the 26-mile course. The boy’s sister was among several people who lost limbs, and his mother was also among the 180 injured ... (Some marathoners ran another two miles to a hospital to donate blood to save lives.)

The week will will also be remembered, a couple days later, for the depressing failure of the U.S. Senate to adopt a modest gun control law, bowing to the pressure of the powerful gun industry led by the National Rifle Association (NRA) even though surveys showed the measure favored by more than 90 per cent of the American people and more than 70 percent of gun owners. The law, which would have required background checks of prospective gun buyers to weed out convicted criminals and people with a history of mental illness, was championed by President Obama after the massacre at an elementary school in December, in which a heavily armed psycho killed 20 children and six educators in a span of 5 minutes before he killed himself.   As horrible as that massacre was, it wasn’t a great aberration in America, just as car bombs aren’t unusual in Baghdad. We’ve had mass shootings in the U.S. every few months for some years now — 62 over the past 30 years, by one compilation. It’s a distinctly American problem that has gotten much, much worse in my lifetime. One reason is that our gun laws have become more lax and the weaponry more deadly. Although many millions of households in America do not have guns, there are still about 350 million guns in private hands — enough to arm every man, woman and child, which also includes every psychopath and sociopath.

America’s gun fanatics don’t really have a problem with this situation.  Seriously. They see their weaponry as the embodiment of American “freedom.” They will tell you, with utter sincerity, that gun violence really has nothing to do with guns. This is the NRA’s party line. Nope, they insist, the problem is poor mental health care, or violent video games and movies, or media coverage that inspires copycats — just about anything but the sheer volume of guns. The NRA argues, in complete seriousness, that the solution to gun violence is more guns. To deal with school shootings, they argue, teachers should be trained and armed — that along with fire extinguishers, schools should have psycho extinguishers. Could you imagine this debate in Vietnam or Australia or any other country?  So the past week left me to wonder which is really worse: Fanatical terrorists who inflict violence on innocent people. . . or politicians who fail to protect innocent people? In a similar vein, a political cartoonist contrasted the heroism of volunteers helping the victims in Boston — and the cowardice of politicians running from responsibility of gun control.

Boston was the birthplace of the revolution that created a nation that sings of itself as “the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”  Americans do enjoy more freedoms than most Earthlings. But courage is needed now, because America is less free than it used to be, especially in terms of the “four freedoms” President Franklin Roosevelt said that everyone deserved: freedom of speech and worship, and freedom from want and fear. Americans are not free from fear.

Terror, American style, comes in various forms. To me the scariest and saddest is homegrown, practically a self-inflicted wound. Even if 9/11 had never happened, even if U.S. authorities continue to prevent al Qaeda and its ilk from doing their worst on American soil, my homeland would still rank No. 1 among developed nations in gun violence. Why? Because American culture — at least as expressed through its politics — tolerates the fanaticism of its gun culture.

The difference between terror and terrorism is the “ism” — a political dimension, and the distinctions can blur in the U.S. Understand that America’s gun fanatics love to wrap themselves in the American flag. They argue that a constitutional amendment written in the age of muskets and flintlocks that refers to a “well-regulated” militia is actually justification for as little regulation as possible, thus legalizing rapid-fire, semiautomatics with exponentially greater killing power that were designed for combat. The gun fanatics think this is a fine and even gloriously American fact — and they gloated after this modest gun control measure failed while most Americans reacted with disgust at the latest example of D.C. dysfunction.

Before 9/11, the deadliest terror attack in American history occurred in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, when a giant home-made fertilizer bomb detonated at a federal building that killed 168  and injured 680. A gun was not used by the terror was gun-related. The terrorist was American citizen, Timothy McVeigh, who was part of the “militia movement” inspired by a temporary, 10-year ban on combat weaponry sparked by the mass shootings at a school in California, which enflamed the paranoid rhetoric of the NRA. Among those killed in Oklahoma City were federal marshals who had worked with former President George H.W. Bush, who was so outraged when the NRA chief referred to federal lawmen as “jack-booted thugs” that he resigned his membership in the NRA. So when I look at the failure of gun control in America, it looks like the fanatics and terrorists are winning.