[...] Just as in the wake of the 9-11 terror attacks last year, a chorus of voices began to point the finger of blame at the very nation that had suffered that enormous loss of life -- seeking to make the connection between U.S. foreign policy and Islamic terrorism -- so is the temperature of this particular crisis likely to soon shift in a similar direction, to what in the criminal courts is denounced as blaming the victim.

The early signs are all around: Federal politicians are again calling for a national ballistics fingerprint system (its effectiveness untested, it ideally would hook up every bullet in the country to the weapon that fired it); CNN duly derisively reported last weekend that, "believe it or not" one of the few events in Rockville, Maryland, that was not cancelled because of the sniper was a local gun show, and some leading American newspapers have begun running opinion pieces about the need for gun control.

It is becoming more clear by the day that one way or another, Americans will wear it for this sniper: If he turns out to be a foreign national, the prototype of some new version of a homicide bomber, apologists will trot out the old 9-11 root-causes rationale to explain him, and blame them; if it turns out he is a home-grown assassin, he will be pronounced the inevitable product of a country in which there are an estimated 222 million firearms and they will be blamed for that.

Curiously, the very night before the sniper last struck, seriously wounding a 37-year-old man as he left a Ponderosa restaurant with his wife in the suburban town of Ashland just north of Richmond, Michael Moore's new pro-gun-control documentary, Bowling for Columbine, was opening to sold-out audiences at select theatres in the beltway area. [...]

One of its final scenes has Mr. Moore, in his usually dishevelled and not terribly clean state, appearing unannounced at the posh Hollywood home of the NRA president, actor Charlton Heston, who actually invites him back the next morning for a chat.

During it, Mr. Moore demands Mr. Heston explain why the United States has so many gun-related homicides while other nations with equally well-armed citizens do not, berates him for failing to offer an easy answer, and then tries to force him to look at the picture of a little girl killed in a horrid tragedy of a gun incident at a Michigan school -- a little girl to whom Mr. Moore has no more or less legitimate or honest connection than Mr. Heston.

This is the best illustration of the film's astonishing tone, which manages to achieve the impossible, in that Mr. Moore successfully cloaks himself as a pacifist while at the same time behaves with overt aggression.

But the scene is also a perfect, tragic metaphor for the way in which gun advocates and the urban liberals who are their foes are inevitably portrayed in the major media.

By any fair measure, Mr. Heston behaves as a reasonable man remarkably civil to his ingrate visitor, perfectly willing to discuss the subject in a sensible way if not to be called upon to come up with a facile response for Mr. Moore on demand. But Mr. Moore controls the camera, and the editing room, and Mr. Heston is left looking foolish, flat-footed and a little feeble-minded, with, guess who, Mr. Moore, appearing the noble-intentioned hero.

This odd result -- that the polite soft-spoken man should emerge the villain, and the bully the good guy -- is also a recurring theme in the sort of American tragedy that began here on Oct. 2, when the first of the sniper's victims was killed.

Americans are perhaps the most generous people on the planet.

Picture this: You are travelling with your husband, and decide to stop for dinner. Afterwards, on the way to the car, he is felled by a single shot to the abdomen. He is flown to hospital, undergoes two separate three-hour surgeries to save his life, during which he loses bits and pieces of various vital organs, and still faces another round of surgeries and probably the raging sort of infection that typically follows gunshot wounds to the gut.

When you have something to say publicly, what do you say?

Well, the wife of the sniper's latest victim yesterday issued a brief statement.

Through Nancy Martin, the trauma program director for the Medical College of Virginia hospitals, this unidentified woman thanked her husband's doctors, area residents and those from their unidentified home town, and asked only for their continued prayers. "Please pray also for the attacker," the woman added, "and that no one else is hurt."

I found the same forgiving folk on my recent trip across this country preparatory to the 9/11 anniversary in New York City. The relatives and friends and co-workers of those who were murdered at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and in a plane that fell into a field in Pennsylvania field responded almost uniformly in this remarkably charitable and unvengeful manner.

[...] The truth of America is that it is a place open, ludicrously free, in every regard, not merely in the ability to get and own a firearm. The truth of Americans is that they are in the main good, God-fearing and forgiving people. They are no more responsible for creatures like this sniper than they were for 9/11, or as Mr. Heston is for that dead child whose picture was held before him by Mr. Moore, quivering with righteous rage.