Measures calling for gun control are often defeated in the name of the "sport hunter." In reality, only about 15 percent of all Americans do any hunting -- but the culture of hunting has effects on the wider culture which may help explain incidents like the recent shooting at Littleton. Steven Zak, an attorney and writer, has written about animals and culture for many publications including The Atlantic magazine and The New York Times.

Some years ago I took a drive into the country and got out to admire a view when someone shot a gun in the woods nearby. The bullet whistled by.

Reports of high school shootings call that day to mind because both incidents indicate that the gun culture, including "sport" hunting, is all around us.

So pervasive is that culture that the press reported with no apparent sense of irony on one dead student's love of hunting along with accounts of other victims' interests in poetry and guitar-playing.

Only about 15% of the American population between the ages of 18 and 65 are hunters, but their cultural influence seems disproportionate to their numbers.

It is rare to see a newspaper editorial or a politician calling for limits on gun proliferation that doesn't tread lightly on hunters' interests. President Clinton made it clear that his recent campaign for stronger gun-control would not interfere with anyone's "legitimate right to hunt." "Change the culture" if you want to limit gun ownership, he challenged, even as he reinforced that culture by legitimizing hunting. 

Culture, by one definition, is "the transfer of information by behavioral means." It should surprise no one that in a culture where animals may be killed merely for sport, some people will absorb the notion that guns may be turned against others for relatively trivial reasons.

The idea that callous harm to animals by "sportsmen" and others has an impact on culture is hardly new. Thomas Aquinas argued that "through being cruel to animals one becomes cruel to human beings." In the 1100s, John of Salisbury thought that hunting degraded human character. In 1809, Lord Erskine introduced a bill against cruelty to animals on the grounds that such behavior would lead to similar treatment of fellow men.

Sport hunters would distract us from the true nature of their activity and its influence on culture by linking it with subsistence hunting. In truth, sports hunting has for centuries been a form of entertainment.

In 1575, Robert Laneham wrote that letting dogs loose on a bear "was a sport very pleasant, to see the bear shake his head twice or thrice with the blood, and the slaver about his physiognomy was a matter of goodly relief." In 1591, Queen Elizabeth, on horseback, used a crossbow to shoot deer captive in an enclosure, to the accompaniment of musicians and a singing nymph.

Many writers have noted that our treatment of animals is often rehearsal for our own interrelationships. Sir Thomas Elyot observed in the seventeenth century that hunting was "the very imitation of battle." Poet William Somervile wrote that it was the "image of war, without its guilt."

A society that condones sport hunting, then, may be rehearsing for battles against external enemies. But with the lethal efficiency and wide availability of modern arms, how surprised should we be when some of those battles are private ones within our own borders?

Of course, no one cause can fully explain events such as those in Littleton, Pearl, West Paducah, Jonesboro, Springfield and Conyers. But hunting deserves its place on the list of suspects. Eighteenth century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that hunters seek "to revenge the insults that they are obliged to bear from their superiors." Perhaps a hunting culture whispers in the ears of disaffected teens that it is reasonable to seek redress for perceived insults by turning guns against innocent peers.

Most Americans don't hunt, but we perpetuate the culture of hunting by tolerating those who do. Maybe part of our horror over school-age killers stems from a sense of our own responsibility.