I’m hardly the only person to make this point, but in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings on Monday, my thinking went something like this: This is horrible… This is horribly familiar… This is getting horribly routine… This isn’t anywhere near as routine as 33 people getting killed senselessly in Iraq… When there’s an attack in Iraq, nobody blinks anymore.

On Monday night, Terry Moran, anchoring Nightline from Blacksburg, predictably touched on the gun control debate, and the fact that this incident isn’t likely to change that debate very much. The program showed footage of George W. Bush, wearing his trademark smirk, answering a gun control question during the 2000 Presidential debate with the guns vs. culture argument—as in, massacres like this one are not the fault of guns, but the fault of a culture that, at some mysterious point in the recent past, started “disrespecting life.”

Hollywood has always been the favorite whipping boy for conservatives making claims that we live in a sick and bankrupt culture, but I would argue that government bears every bit as much responsibility for setting the parameters of cultural conversation, and nothing embodies a fundamental disrespect for human life more than our actions in Iraq over the past four years. I feel that Seung Cho’s rampage on Monday is connected in a very basic way to the ongoing violence overseas, a connection brought home yesterday with the release of the video Cho sent to NBC in which he referenced George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden.

In other words, perhaps Bush is right. Perhaps we are living in a culture that’s begun to disrespect life. But if so, the explanation can be found at the very highest levels of government, which are permeated by a disrespect for life that trickles down into the culture at large.

Almost as an exclamation point to this argument, the Times yesterday carried the news that 171 people had been killed in five separate bombings in Baghdad. It wasn’t even the day’s top story.