By RAY WADDLE A murderous month is finally done, leaving behind its stain of dread and a national reluctance to face the shadow side of its faith and values. Almost annually now, April unfolds as a mocking contradiction, something to brace for. Spring renewal runs neck-and-neck with horror. The tally of recent Aprils is numbing: the Waco Branch Davidian firestorm (1993), the Oklahoma City bombing (1995), the Columbine school massacre (1999), and Virginia Tech. "April is the cruelest month," T.S. Eliot announced in "The Waste Land" in 1922 — the most famous opening line in modern poetry, now a bizarre irony. (Yes, April is National Poetry Month.) After the dead were counted at Virginia Tech, well-funded arguments about gun violence broke out all over. With vein-popping anger, the pros and cons lined up for their TV close-ups to talk of gun control. If all college kids had guns for defending themselves, said pro-gun defenders, this would not happen. The retort was: "Nations with tight gun laws have, on the whole, less gun violence; countries with somewhat restrictive gun laws have some gun violence; countries with essentially no gun laws have a lot of gun violence," argued New Yorker magazine last week. A notion lingers: America is uniquely violent. Eighty people die daily from gunfire, 29,000 a year, an estimated 1 million in the past 40 years. The question, of course, is why. Yet here the arguing turns curiously quiet. Explanations go two ways, either "violence is the price of freedom" or "it cannot be fathomed; there is no explanation." Unspoken daily assumptions that keep the national routine well-oiled are struck dumb when random killing erupts. One reassuring fiction: There is no connection between media violence (those lucrative movies and videos that celebrate murder) and real-life bloody cruelty. This cherished idea allows film studios and software companies to get rich without feeling guilty. If it is profitable, it is good for America. Peacetime prosperity during the 1980s and 90s changed our relationship to violence. It got glamorized. Watching the movie Pulp Fiction a dozen years ago at the old Lions Head Cinema, I saw moviegoers go giddy with laughter at the explosions of human blood. Something new was happening, some strange new darkness descending. Martin Luther King Jr. (an April assassination) made history as our first hero of nonviolence. It has been a slow, awkward acceptance. His competition is a historic gallery of gangsters and outlaws who exalted a reckless freedom, violently taming the wilderness, making their own rules under the lonely sky. Milllions of Americans secretly admire such gunsligners above all. "Troubled" individuals tap into similar delusions of absolute freedom. Killing becomes an erotic thrill, a merger of self-hatred and eternity, a substitute for transcendence. The question for society now is whether love and religion can outlast the economy of violence raging inside tormented minds.