Kawaldeep Singh would have learned long division this year. His skin was unblemished, his face open and eager, a pleasure to watch. He may have thrilled to the forbidden or scary, but he still reached for his mother's hand.

I know this without ever having laid eyes on the boy. He was a fourth-grader. It is a golden age. Kids revel in being kids, even as they sense the possibilities of adolescence a few years away. Their friends mean a lot to them, but their parents mean everything.

On Thursday police covered the fourth-grader's body with a blue plastic tarp, so his classmates wouldn't have to see him dead and bloodied.

Investigators say Kawaldeep was shot by his father, who was arguing with the boy's mother. The mother was wounded by a gunshot.

I'm looking at a photograph of the blue tarp and wondering how and why we let the anger lapse. How and why did we stop calling for changes when guns can be found in every corner of the land and children are dying of bullet wounds?

Certainly, if what police are saying is correct, something was deeply wrong inside the father. Something was badly broken in the relationship between the parents.

I also am aware that a knife -- not a gun -- was the weapon used in another domestic violence crime this week, a presumed murder-suicide in Johnson County.

But I believe wanton gun production and distribution played a role in Kawaldeep's death. Americans use guns not to protect but to intimidate, to gain the upper hand in conflicts, to give a fatal exclamation to their rage.

Though Kawaldeep's murder took place outside of a Catholic school, the trouble began at home. The relationship between firearms and domestic violence is well documented.

A study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1993 calculated that having a gun in the home increased a woman's risk of becoming a homicide victim threefold. Another public health study found that guns were used in 65 percent of family homicides.

Kawaldeep, who reportedly stepped between his feuding parents, might well be alive had his father not had a gun.

So when did we stop protesting this intrusion of guns into the fabric of American life? When did the Million Moms purge their membership rolls?

Part of the turn came after Sept. 11, 2001, when people perceived -- incorrectly -- that the danger from foreign shores outweighs the damage we inflict on ourselves.

But the change had begun before that, with the results of the 2000 elections. The gun lobby was judged to be a decisive influence on votes for president in several states, including Missouri. Few politicians have dared to challenge it since.

This campaign season, even with sniper attacks paralyzing the Washington, D.C., region, guns never emerged as an issue.

Jean Carnahan had to go skeet shooting to demonstrate her allegiance to sportsmen. Nobody pressed Jim Talent, her Republican opponent in Missouri's Senate race, to explain his support for unfettered gun access and its role in urban and domestic violence.

Someday, perhaps, we will look at the list of parents, children, workers and passers-by killed by gunshots, and realize it is a larger tally than the death toll from terrorism.

On that list will be the name of Kawaldeep Singh. He was in the fourth grade.

To leave a comment for Barbara Shelly, call (816) 234-4800 and enter 4594, or send e-mail to bshelly@kcstar.com.