What you have offered as an explanation is pretty dead-on correct. We have became a nation that doesn't not understand, endorse, teach, or aspire to any kind of morality except that which pleases our own self. The old "if it feels good, do it" has finally come to full maturity and the cost is so horrendous we can scarce take it in, yet we insist it can't be our flawed ethics, our flawed lack of morality. It must be something evil (like guns) that are causing this ...those things should be easy to fix through legislation. What is hard to fix is our own bankrupt ethics.