I know. What was I thinking?

He didn't need the encouragement. He's been turning cylindrical objects into guns since he was 2 - Tinker Toys, wooden blocks, bananas. Despite my best efforts to "de-gun" the house and limit his access to adult television, like any kid, he absorbed the concept somewhere.

But I was tired of fighting the whine. So, I rationalized my $1.50 purchase. It was a crappy Spider-Man gun that pumped foam tubes into the air - not really a gun, I told myself. When the plunger broke, I was relieved. I could quickly and quietly tuck it into the garbage when he wasn't looking.

Instead, he improvised, picking it up, pointing it at people and making gunshot noises.

Mortified, but resigned, I'm starting to think it won't matter what I do. My little boy will never be immune to America's cult of the gun.

Sulejman Talovic's father wondered at a country that would allow his angry son to buy a gun without him knowing. Cho Seung-Hui's parents are probably equally bewildered.

Talovic and Cho come from very different backgrounds. But both ended up in essentially the same spot thousands of miles and months apart - dead by bullet and surrounded by the carnage they created.

A Bosnian high school dropout and a South Korean college English major wouldn't seem to have much in common. But one thing they shared was an adolescence spent in the United States and a proximity to that most American of convenience stores: the gun shop.

Somewhere along the way, while they were learning the joys of cartoons and Happy Meals, two immigrant boys became archeÂtypal mass murderers. It's a psychological profile this country is particularly skilled at creating - if only because we put the lethally effective tools of the trade in their hands with as little hassle as possible.

Cho was 8 when he and his parents left Seoul in 1992 and moved to Centreville, Va. A year later, Talovic fled his childhood home on foot and watched Serb soldiers inflict their torture on his neighbors and family. He settled in Utah when he was 10. Each boy's immigrant parents worked long hours. Talovic's father as a construction worker; his mother washing dishes on the night shift. Cho's parents toiling in a dry-cleaning shop.

None of this explains what they did. Both 18-year-old Talovic and 23-year-old Cho had unique psychoses that led them to slaughter innocent bystanders at a Salt Lake City shopping mall and the Virginia Tech campus.

Still, both disaffected loners only turned into mass murderers after they found guns to give them power. Talovic bought his weapon of choice, a shotgun, at a Salt Lake City sporting goods store. He didn't need to submit to a background check, and none of his juvenile scrapes with the law would have been flagged if he did. Despite writing disturbingly violent plays, stalking two women and spending some time in a mental hospital, Cho quickly paid for his 9mm handgun at a Roanoke gun shop and packed it home to his dorm.

Talovic killed five at Trolley Square and will remain infamous only in Utah. Cho earned an asterisk for breaking all American mass shooting records when he killed 32 college students and professors before turning his gun on himself. In the end, both have become twisted icons of U.S. history and the polarized gun-rights/gun-control debate.

It's a dubious distinction for two immigrant boys whose parents brought them here for a better life. Unfortunately, they found guns first.

walsh@sltrib.com