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In times of profound social decay like ours, where the moral high ground has been ground to dust, everything seems upside down.

Greed and hypocrisy are elevated to the status of common sense. The narcissism of our consumer culture equates virtue with buying power. Unintended consequences become the norm.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, for instance, guarantees the right to bear arms. Its intent was to ensure self-preservation, national security and self-defense. Its result is a gun culture of carelessness and whining entitlement transformed to political clout.

In gun-saturated America, where anyone has the right to own anything they can buy with a credit card, more than 30,000 people a year are "shot to death in murders, suicides and accidents. Another 65,000 suffer from gun injuries," says a report in the Harvard University Gazette.

In America, on average, firearms kill about 85 people daily. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States is first in the world in gun deaths. We have some 14 gun deaths for every 100,000 people. Northern Ireland has just over six and a half, and Israel just under three. Guns are close to being the leading cause of death by injury in the United States.

What kind of danger do guns represent in a culture in which fair play and social conscience have been brushed aside by greed and power? Injustice breeds frustration, which breeds resentment and, perhaps, violence, especially in people who are mentally or emotionally unbalanced. This can be acutely dangerous in a country literally chock-full of guns with enormous firepower.

If you believe that guns don't kill people, people do, then angry, frustrated, narcissistic people with guns in a society increasingly unfair and ruled by the law of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, pose a frightening situation, indeed.

Who knows what sets off a mass murderer? It's reasonable to assume that at least part of the answer is the availability of weapons and the level of mass social frustration that often leads to pressures on personal relationships.

In our society, the bosses get extravagant pay incentives, while sales clerks, who do good work for years in certain companies, get fired because their salaries are too high. Whistleblowers, serving the public good, are fired for exposing fraud. Students graduate from college with an average debt of some $16,000 dollars, while Sallie Mae, the student-loan behemoth, is taken over by private investors who make more money as students go deeper in debt.

The Supreme Court refuses to hear a case in which Enron's financial victims could file for restitution under the Crime Victims Rights Act, if Enron founder Kenneth Lay's conviction, thrown out at his death, could be reinstated.

Guns, consumerism and callous unfairness - what a lethal mix.