My intense disgust at the stranger-on-stranger shootings gave way to a more nuanced thought process, a balancing act if you wish, as I wondered how any homeowner could shoot a boy through the door just because he had the temerity to knock on the door? How could anyone fire a gun at a departing car just because the car’s owners happened to drive by one’s home at night, in the dark? And yet as horrific and tragic as these two episodes are, they are but an isolated few compared to the insistent drum beat of gun violence in America.

And then of course two more incidents occurred a few days later. Someone shot at a cheerleader’s car after one of the women had mistakenly entered his car. Then, someone shot a 6-year-old boy because the boy’s ball rolled into his yard.

All of these incidents have several things in common: white men with guns, who spend inordinate amounts of time on certain radical online websites, or watching a certain type of TV. The 84-year-old man who shot the 17-year-old Black youth — he knocked on the wrong door looking for his siblings — spent most of his days watching Fox News, his son reported. All I know is, the network’s content has a way of inflaming certain negative sentiments about immigrants, Muslims, Jews, Blacks. Compound this with a dose of “replacement” paranoia, isolation and a sense of ever-growing grievances, it leads to an eerily flammable character.

The callousness and senselessness of the attacks is disturbing, bordering on the insane. I imagine the 84-year-old man, gun in hand, looking out of his window to see a Black boy approaching. He was not frightened, rather, he harbored animus towards Blacks.

The episodes I recount above are part of America’s gun culture, a culture in which strangers kill strangers: schoolchildren, drive-by victims, the moviegoing public. The current murderous fever is like a hurricane that gathers strength from its environs.

In addition to high-capacity guns, the other most important ingredients are hate and fear, something America has a surplus supply of. Internet networks, militant groups, TV stations are the merchants of fear and hate. And as we know well from Rupert Murdoch and Alex Jones, there are large amounts of money to be made peddling messages of alienation, fear of replacement and grievances about nonwhite foreigners.

The ease with which lives are taken in our great nation is astonishingly scary. We kill with great abandon, completely bereft of compunction. Our souls are leached of love and empathy. And yet I remember my colleagues and I spending thousands of hours saving American lives, one at a time; a job that requires great expertise and long years of training.

It’s astonishing to compare what we do to save a life to how easy it is to mow down kids. All one needs is a few dollars, an AR-15, and you are set to kill: schoolchildren, El Paso Hispanics, Blacks shopping in Buffalo or praying in Charleston, South Carolina and Jews in their synagogue in Pittsburgh. The cost of managing gun injuries in America is staggering. Shouldn’t someone pay for it?

America distinguishes herself from other developed nations by gun crowds streaming into gun shops during or after each political or economic crisis.

The answer to our troubles is more guns. To me, this is bizarre as it is to many young Americans. They disagree with their parents’ gun acquisition mania. Tired of being sacrificial lambs at the altar of the 2nd Amendment, they believe in their own life and liberty. I hope they continue to fight for an America with less gun violence — fewer guns — and a moment schoolchildren don’t tremble with fear for their lives.

There is a great deal to admire and love about America, so much that attracts so many to her shores. Racism and the gun culture are not among them. Rather, they detract from the Founding Fathers’ idealism and the Democracy they envisaged.

We all value and cherish what America stands for, even as we watch it incessantly and incrementally eroded by a culture of destruction, bloodletting and selfish mindlessness. It is our duty, we who can, to serve as an antidote to the poison that churns in America’s blood stream, attempting to overturn this great experiment in government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Pius Kamau, M.D., a retired general surgeon, is president of the Aurora-based Africa America Higher Education Partnerships (AAHEP); co-founder of the Africa Enterprise Group and an activist for minority students’ STEM education. He is a National Public Radio commentator, Huffington Post blogger, and past columnist for Denver dailies. He has authored a memoir and a novel recounting Kenya’s bloody colonial history.