By a curiosity of evolution, every human skull harbors a prehistoric vestige: a reptilian brain.
This atavism, like a hand grenade cushioned in the more civilized surrounding cortex, is the dark hive where many of mankind's primitive impulses originate. To go partners with that throwback, Americans have carried out of their own history another curiosity that evolution forgot to discard as the country changed from a sparsely populated, underpoliced agrarian society to a modern industrial civilization. That vestige is the gunmost notoriously the handgun, an anachronistic tool still much...