"Has Obama's election prompted a rightist backlash?" the BBC's website asked after the killing of an abortion doctor in Kansas and a gun attack on Washington's Holocaust Museum. The piece of analysis that followed reached the sensible yet ultimately unhelpful conclusion that the election of Barack Obama "may have intensified" right-wing violence, but it didn't "create" it.

But whoever suggested that Obama created it by getting himself elected, him being black and all? Surely no one sane. Even that nice Shep Smith on Fox is alarmed by the increasingly violent tone of the emails Rupert Murdoch's network is getting from its viewers. He should see the ones I get.

The U.S., as the BBC concludes, "is a country where the existence of extreme ideas on the fringes of mainstream life and the wide availability of firearms create a potent cocktail."

But the BBC and commentators like Paul Krugman are far too genteel on this subject. It falls to me to be forthright.

I wouldn't call the accused Washington killer, James von Brunn, 88, a "potent cocktail." I'd call him your basic Lee Harvey Oswald (and yes, he was a lone gunman). I cannot wait to hear how a geriatric white supremacist who had already been imprisoned for a terror attack on the Federal Reserve managed to get a gun in the first place. That is a real achievement, and I don't mean on the part of the gunman. The gun setup in the U.S. is an invitation to the maiming and killing of citizens.

Will they never learn

To my increasing dread, that includes presidents. Will they never learn? As the Guardian reported back in 2007, "Since the killing of John F. Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century."

No one knows how many guns there are in the U.S., but one study put it at 215 million, with more than half of all U.S. households having one. I was shocked to hear that von Brunn had taken his gun to Washington – even Oswald didn't get that close to his dream – but remembered that last year the Supreme Court overturned a ban on handguns in Washington. It's as if they were putting a fresh minnow on a hook and dangling it for any crazy old pike that came along.

How did a sad manipulated schizophrenic like Scott Roeder, the alleged killer of Dr. George Tiller, get his hands on a gun? The question is rather, how could he fail to?

Von Brunn and Roeder are a type, they're the type that kills presidents and that's why the U.S. has to take things down a notch, as Obama has put it.

Americans known to overreact

Americans are what I sadly but accurately term Escalators. Present them with any situation and they will overreact. Unlike that retro British Second World War poster so unaccountably popular right now, Americans will not "Stay Calm and Carry On". They will consternate, inflate and run wildly off in all directions. Their Patton always overcomes their Bradley. This is their greatest strength and their sorriest weakness, why I love them and so admire their culture, and why they still fill me with despair. They'll always want to take it up to 11, and I fear for them.

Canadians, in contrast, abhor the escalator. They will take the stairs. The down stairs. Yes, it's boring here but we bleed less.

Back to the Americans, pounding up the escalator. They heard a sound. Buy a gun. More guns. Bigger guns. Another school shooting? Arm the professors. Hell, arm the students. Why not save time and pre-shoot people?

Americans use illegal drugs with great energy. Jail the dealers. The users. Longer sentences. Make them mandatory. Build bigger prisons. Make them supermaxes.

It may be time to de-escalate

Vietnam War lost? Stay on that military escalator, into Afghanistan, Iraq. Can't fight IEDs? Build drones. Take that tech higher.

The savings and loan debacle? Keep it up. The dot.com bubble. The collapse of a no-rules Wall Street. The housing catastrophe. Fail bigger! Fail better!

Terrorists are as impossible to fight as the Vietcong? They won't fight conventionally? Torture them. Outsource the torture.

That escalator keeps on churning, and not just because of Fox News. It's time for that wondrous country down south to de-escalate.

It won't end gloriously. In the days after Jacqueline Kennedy cleaned her husband's brains off the pink pillbox hat she wore to Dallas, she said that he had died for nothing. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist."

It was cheap and pathetic and over, whether it was 1963 in Dallas or 1968 in Memphis and Los Angeles. Obama is the last best hope. Please don't let it end.