I don't think you can totally generalize from

one act to a society as a whole — that would

be too much of a judgment. To me the more

significant aspect is that we allow people to

get guns so easily, and not just anyguns but

semi-automatics, which can kill a large

number of people in a very short time. That

seems to me to be completely insane, and

the U.S. is the only developed country in the

world that does it. I think the NRA has blood

on its hands, clearly. If those weapons w

not available, maybe one or two people would have been killed, but not six or seven,

as it may turn out to be. So I think that's the issue that the U.S. really needs to look at. I think that's been obvious for a very long time but this just

shows it very clearly."

If you're referring to heated political rhetoric, I think some of the rhetoric has been crazily over-the-top,

and there are a lot of people in the U.S. who hold what I think are nutty views about the dangers of

government providing health care, for example — once again every developed country in the world

except the U.S. provides health care to all its citizens, and I think those countries are just as free as the

U.S. So I think there are a lot of crazy views out there and yes, there is a problem with that. I'm not sure

how much you can pin on a single incident. If that's the view you want to independently grab from looking

at the rhetoric, and it's certainly something that I've thought for a long time, following the debate about

health care, and contributed to it. I think there really are a crazy views in the U.S. which seem to be held

by quite a lot of people, but I suppose you could say that if tens of millions of people hold these views, it's

ot surprising one should be crazy enough to want to kill people because of them. That's a possible

implication.