SHORT of Cho posting his videos on YouTube instead of posting them to an old-fashioned TV network, the deranged man behind the Virginia Tech slaughter couldn't have been a better model of a postmodern mass murderer. But many people here had already let their own prejudice do their thinking for them.

Namely, America's culture of "god and guns" had produced an even greater atrocity than the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. Bush and Iraq and the National Rifle Association are to blame. Witness for the prosecution, Michael Moore.

Case closed. Certainly the editorial page of The Irish Times was eager, depressingly eager, to locate the tragedy there.

An op-ed by one Gearoid O Tuathail, who teaches politics at Virginia Tech under the name Gerard Toal, written as details of the event were still unclear, was published on Wednesday. The introduction informs us that "America's gun culture" and "collective anxiety and insecurity", "lie behind" the tragedy.

O Tuathail leaves himself enough room to avoid accusations that he's arguing cause and effect but nevertheless can't resist putting it out there, after the inevitable reference to America being "ruled by" the anti-intellectual Bush: "As it was during Columbine, America is engaged in a divisive war overseas. The Iraq war is embittering the heartland of America as the casualties mount and public accountability is shirked by its leaders."

This reference to Columbine and a "divisive war" struck me as odd, but only because I haven't gorged myself on reruns of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, where a spurious connection between the two was made for the first time. Nato's war to protect Kosovar Albanians from Serbia can hardly be described as divisive in American terms.

Thinking on the subject done for them by Moore, mediated by Gearoid O Tuathail and The Irish Times, many could give themselves a little pat on the head, bask in the moral vanity of the self-righteous and get back to work.

Reality soon broke free of the knee-jerk narrative that had the story written, in this case literally, before even basic facts . . . like the identity of the killer . . . were known.

The killer wasn't a poor white redneck loner, probably brought up in a violent southern family heavy on bibles, bullets and reverence for the military, like the caricature we at first see in the spooky camera-boy of American Beauty.

He turns out to be a South Korean who immigrated to America aged eight, may have been autistic, lived with his parents in a middle class suburb, was held involuntarily in a mental health facility two years ago and was so uniquely messed up as to defy any existing categories. Though that didn't stop new ones from being tried on.

Cho wrote truly disturbing fiction that included graphic violence and abuse. Did this, in and of itself, make him a threat? Better lock up Ireland's postmodern gothic master John Connolly just in case.

Cho watched violent films, like most Americans. Yet poses struck by Cho in his videos seem to emulate scenes from Korean bloodfest Oldboy and films by Hong Kong-born John Woo, known for his "ballet of violence" direction.

Cho was "ruled by" Bush, who put emotion before intellect to get elected. And? Where is this idyll where intellect trumps emotion in public life?

Is it Ireland then? Try going to a Wolfe Tones gig wearing a poppy on Remembrance Sunday or watch Dick Roche paint himself as an environmentalist. The French see torching cars as a form of argument.

Clearly Britain and Germany recently waged high-minded campaigns resembling 18thcentury Enlightenment salons.

As for a link to Iraq, last week at a Dublin conference I spoke to a Virginia Tech grad who drew a contrast.

"It's sad to say, but 32 people get shot in Virginia and it's a global event. The president comes. But it's an average day in Baghdad." He's from the area. He knows victims. He, like most Americans I know, is heartbroken about Iraq.

He's a walking rebuttal to the sort of cheap prejudice paraded by The Irish Times on the back of the tragedy.

There is a manifest need for a radical overhaul of America's gun laws. That a man officially deemed a threat to himself and others by reason of mental illness was approved to purchase the gun may be the spur for change. Damning an entire culture with casual bigotry won't advance that cause.