Two young men, shot skating in Bryant Park.

Disturbing, yes, but not simply because the Saturday-night incident left the victims - one of them a 14-year-old boy - injured. The senseless act of violence, apparently tied to a thwarted attempt to steal a skater's coat, also disrupted a sense of security that the venerable old park behind the New York Public Library had justly earned.

Two decades ago, Bryant Park was a metaphor for urban decay - a Midtown haven for the homeless, drug dealers and prostitutes. Today, thanks to the work of the nonprofit Bryant Park Corp, the park has become an oasis in the midst of a great city, offering tourists and area workers splendid panoramic views of the architectural triumphs that ring the park as well as respite from the cares of the workaday world.

With a 16-year-old in custody Sunday, things were back to normal at the nearly 10-acre park just a few blocks from Times Square. Children whirled around the rink, onlookers sipped coffee from adjacent observation areas and a feeling of general well-being was in evidence on a rather raw and windy November afternoon.

But this grotesquely obscene incident reminds us that despite the media coverage afforded to foreign terrorism, random acts of violence committed by one's own countrymen also constitute a big threat to public safety.

That was the prevailing view of those who took part in a Reuters/Ipso poll taken immediately in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing in April. The poll suggested that Americans have been left on edge following a string of attacks, at a Colorado movie theater, at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, at a Connecticut elementary school, and at the Boston Marathon. Since the survey was taken, the shootings at the Washington DC navy yard have lengthened the list.

When incidents like the Bryant Park shooting occur, media outlets pay entirely too much attention to gun control laws - instead of focusing on the real issue, which is human beings' propensity for violence. Chinese media often highlight China's lack of gun crime - and its strict control of firearms (contrasted with the US's more lax gun laws).

For instance, on the day of the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings, in which 20 children and six staff members were murdered, a disturbed man in Henan in central China entered a rural elementary school and went on rampage with a knife, injuring 23 people. No one died. My China Daily colleague, Chen Weihua, wrote in an op-ed piece that "if buying a gun in China was as easy as in the US, that tragedy could have been worse than Newtown".

Nevertheless, Americans aren't the only ones wondering what is becoming of their society. This summer, a spate of deadly knife attacks and other violent acts in the country had many in China asking, "How could this happen here?"

In one incident, Simon Denver of the Washington Post reported, a man bought a knife in a Beijing supermarket and randomly attacked customers with it, including a baby. Another stole a knife from a roadside snack bar and started attacking passersby. A third got into an argument with a woman, picked her 2-year-old girl out of her stroller and smashed her baby to the ground, killing her.

Although the Chinese government and sympathetic academics blamed most of the incidents on mental illness and even on hot weather, as Denver reported, the nature of violence suggests there is a deeper cause behind these acts.

Hu Xingdou, a Beijing University of Technology economics professor, said the pressures of modern life, combined with China's fraught 20th century history of violent revolution and upheaval, had eroded the bonds of trust that bound society together, according to the Washington Post article. "Current Chinese society is a people against people society," Hu was quoted as saying. "People in the past society experienced a long time of class struggle education ... Now people live only for the purpose of making money."

The point, no matter where you live, is that gun controls aren't necessarily the way to stop random violence. Random violence isn't necessarily a gun problem. It's a violence problem.

Contact the writer at michaelbarris@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily USA 11/11/2013 page2)