Joe Raedle / Getty Images No other prosperous country not torn by civil conflict has anything like our volume of mass killings. Lee Siegel on America’s shameful epidemic.

Nidal Malik Hasan may have shouted “Allahu Akbar” before his murderous onslaught at Fort Hood, but his actions were part of an American phenomenon that is a national emergency.

You had barely enough time to grasp what might have happened in the Cleveland home of convicted rapist Anthony Sowell, where police so far have found the remains of 11 women, when news came of Hasan’s massacre. Yet just as that terrible event was starting to sink in, the airwaves were burning up with reports of a shooting rampage in an office building in Orlando, Florida, in which 8 people were said to have been shot, one—as of this writing—fatally.

We have to start examining whether the general free-for-all of our economic system, and the pleasure-seeking ethos of our commercialism, and the ideology of immediate gratification that is corroding any type of respect for authority-whether these "fr