People keep trying to blame all these shootings on mental illness or racial tensions or neo-Nazis or what have you, but I’m telling you: It’s the guns.

People in the United States are being killed in an orgy of violence so frequently that it’s harder and harder to resist the notion that mass shootings are routine. You know: Another day, another school shooting. Another night, another music venue. Another Saturday afternoon, another mall shooting.

These things aren’t happening because we don’t have prayer in schools, or because children aren’t reared by stay-at-home mothers the way they used to be, or because our society is increasingly secular.

It’s happening because a culture of fear and hatred has been created around firearms, and because of the simple technology of a gun.

If you don’t believe it, think back to those halcyon days of the 1950s, when Mom stayed home with small children, we said a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance at school each morning, and people weren’t routinely shot, much less stabbed, clubbed or beaten to death.

What’s different is the culture.

Today’s remarkable proliferation of firearms is fueled by a political machine that has taken the issue of gun ownership and made it a tool to keep its people in office and flush with cash. The same machine has used judge-made law to bend the U.S. Constitution to its will.

For example: The Second Amendment is talked about more and understood less than any words in government. The amendment plainly says that a well-regulated citizen army is good thing, and that citizens can be militiamen as a matter of right.

At the time the amendment was written, it was in contrast to the professional armies of Europe that oppressed citizens by keeping them from raising militias. In 2008, the justices of the Supreme Court changed that. Now the right to have a weapon is an individual right, not the collective right to serve in the national guard.

However, the law isn’t the problem. The culture of fear and hate is — and its byproduct is a lot of dead people and grieving families.

I believe the problem comes down to four words. Fear, hatred, myth and technology.

Fear and love are our two primary emotions. Fear turns anyone you don’t understand, know or agree with into someone you hate.  From the ancestors who took the trusty shooting iron from above the fireplace to blaze away at those repressive British soldiers, to the fantasy of the steely eyed homeowner who defends Mom and the kids with his collection of military style weapons, there is a lot of mythmaking in the gun culture.

Thanks to technology, we now have better-than-ever tools for killing people. This is nothing new. We discovered a long time ago that metal weapons were better than sticks and rocks. Now we’ve advanced to semi-automatic guns with high-capacity magazines.

The efficiency — coupled with lots of guns and lots of paranoid people who are crazy or mean or both — is expressed by a body count. If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you’re a gun nut, everyone looks like a target.

I have known just two people who killed another person. One was my father, who was haunted for the rest of his life by the Germans he’d killed in Europe during World War II.

The other was a policeman. He’s a successful businessman now. Years ago, he shot and killed a man who had pointed his laser-sighted weapon at the policeman’s partner.

One night at our dining room table, where we were debating the causes underlying the culture of violence that had begun to torture our nation, this man — who has a perspective on the subject that most of us don’t have — said, “Trust me. It’s the guns.”

He was right then, and wherever he is, he’s right now. But until we stand up to the powerful gun lobby and insist that our political leaders do the same, nothing will change except the locations of the shootings.

Because it’s the guns.

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.