A Bruce Springsteen lyric seems to capture America’s frustration in the wake of a series of shocking school shootings: “There’s just a meanness in this world.” But after the atrocity in Amish country, shootings in Wisconsin and Colorado, and an aborted shooting by a 13-year-old in Missouri, meanness seems an inadequate explanation. Each of the perpetrators had his own twisted reason for wanting to take the lives of children, just as parents, children, and educators will take separate lessons from the atrocities. Parents will demand, and schools will agree to, enhanced security procedures and policies on bullying. Children will read the headlines and wonder who among their peers — and who among the grownups — is capable of shattering their world.

Some of the reactions are healthy and necessary, others are unfortunate, but each is inevitable. But if we focus as a society only on the motivations of the shooters and the policies of the schools, we risk missing an obvious root of the problem: the easy availability of firearms in this country. At the national level, gun control has been crowded off leaders’ agendas by violence in distant lands. In local races, the powerful gun lobby has largely neutralized the discussion to the point that even candidates in blue states need to be photographed cradling, often unconvincingly, a hunting rifle.

Groups like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence say their efforts, after some successes in the 1990s, have only gotten more difficult in recent years, especially since a ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. Enacting legislation that would make it harder to crack down on gun dealers has become an uphill battle, as have efforts to trace the provenance of guns used to commit crimes.

President Bush has convened a meeting of experts to discuss how the federal government can help states and local governments improve school safety. One way is to address the root of the problem and examine the legislative and lobbying obstacles that have turned the cult of the Second Amendment into a movement that puts all our children at risk.