Present-day American males are the most pampered examples of their species in history, and compensate by vicariously nurturing self-images of masculinity removed from reality

If there was anything unique about Cho Seung-Hui, it wasn't that he was a paranoid schizophrenic armed with Walther .22 and 9mm Glock pistols and driven by unfathomable torment and rage. The rest of the world understands very well that mental illness and the easy availability of guns have made for a lethal combination throughout American history, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The endlessly repeated statistics of domestic death and mayhem, which most Americans still adamantly brush aside, tell their own story.

What singled out Cho Seung-Hui was that he was the first post-YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and IM disaffected youth of his kind - a product of 21st-century technology, rather than just that of the 20th. From his addiction to a ghastly, violent video game called Counter-Strike in his teens, he had moved on: he knew exactly how to produce 28 QuickTime video clips and 43 photos of himself, aware that by sending them to NBC, his first and last moments of stardom would not only reach the MM (as the mainstream media are nowadays derisively called by his generation), but would also be flashed around the world in seconds via YouTube and the like, allowing him to leave his own brief but indelible mark on history. Manifestly delusional though he may have been, he knew exactly how to look a camera in the eye and address it like a pro.

Never before, in fact, have young Americans been so bombarded with images of violence, a trend that is alarming mental-health specialists. Dr Mark Mills, a distinguished forensic psychiatrist who has written extensively on the subject for publications such as the American Journal of Psychiatry, tells me: "The thing that has changed . . . is that anybody wanting to see violence can now see it." Films of the execution of Saddam Hussein and the beheadings of hostages in Iraq, for example, are still the images on YouTube (which had 6,030 clips of Saddam's execution available last Monday) that are most sought after by young Americans.

I know not just kids addicted to such video games in the way Cho Seung-Hui was, but younger teachers, too. For the overwhelming majority, the craze passes and video games and online surfing become harmless. A 17-year-old I know, for instance, logged on at the appointed 5pm a few days ago to learn whether his (online) college application had been successful. He immediately phoned a girlfriend to give her his news, and within 15 seconds a mutual friend had logged in to his Facebook page to congratulate him. Less than a minute later, a cousin across the continent in California had chimed in: a generation permanently texting and socialising online, but in a nation besotted with violence.

Therein lies the unparalleled danger for the US, one that does not apply to any other western country whose young people have similarly easy access to the internet. Violence flows through the American bloodstream. The craze never passed for 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui.

Present-day American males are the most primped and pampered examples of their species in history, and compensate by vicariously nurturing self-images of masculinity that are removed from reality. Hence the ready availability of their would-be macho guns and most Americans' refusal to face the blindingly obvious: that the Virginia Tech tragedy would never have happened had Cho Seung-Hui not been able to walk into an all-American gun shop called Roanoke Firearms and walk away minutes later with his Glock and 50 rounds of ammunition for $571 (or log on to eBay, as he later did, to buy magazines for more ammo).

I was sitting around a lunch table with a group of television executives a couple of days after the shootings, and the talk centred entirely around whether NBC was right to air Cho's rants. Nobody brought up the unmentionable subject of the availability of guns, and I chickened out from doing so. The US media (and practically every leading Democrat) have skipped and danced and weaved around the subject, ending up transfixed like rabbits in headlights. The Washington Post had 75 reporters on the story within minutes - I'm not exaggerating - but you could learn more from one British report in the Sunday Times, say, than from the Post's convoluted coverage.

Thus, 21st-century American men who have never been under fire themselves, or even heard a shot fired in anger, inevitably became the most vociferous cheerleaders for what is actually mass denial. Bill O'Reilly, the current resident clown-in-chief of Fox News, told viewers that it was "the far left" calling for gun control. My erstwhile opposite number on the Spectator, Mark Steyn, thought that a wimpy new "culture of passivity" had stopped the poor kids at Virginia Tech from somehow storming and subduing Cho. It is "this awful corrosive passivity", rather than "the psycho killer", said Steyn, writing in the National Review, that is the real threat to the nation.

Dream on, America.

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