But how strong, really, is America?
Americans are dying by the thousands at the hands of other Americans and the country can't figure out what to do about it.
the U.S. Senate could not manage to approve a minuscule improvement to the country's efforts to keep weapons out of the hands of potential criminals, including possible terrorists even though polls show most of the public support it.
No other nation has even a small portion of America's military power or a fraction of its reach. The country's enemies know they have nowhere to hide.
More than 30,000 people in the United States are killed every year by someone brandishing a gun.
It is a staggering number, no matter what you believe about the right to bear arms. A problem that causes so many people to die every year is one that requires urgent attention.
And yet America simply cannot find a way to stop it. How strong is that?
It is as if a house stood protected as a fortress, with a high fence around it, with guard towers and alarm systems to keep intruders out, while inside the residents were slaughtering one another.
When you travel abroad, people ask what it is about Americans and their guns. As much as we hear from hunters, the issue goes much deeper than that. From the founding days of the nation, freedom lay at its core, and freedom has been viewed as protection from an overreaching government. The Second Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1791, states that the people have a right to "bear arms," but it also prefaces it with what sounds like a caveat, that this is because "a well regulated militia" is "necessary to the security of a free state."
The romance and the freedom, it's all part of America's character and history. Americans will never look at guns the way, say, the Dutch look at them.
In some respects, that is part of America's strength. The people feel a very personal stake, a direct responsibility for the country's freedom.
And yet, not even the most ardent gun lovers would argue that it is acceptable for young men filled with hatred, dangerously disturbed or with a track record of violence, to have free access to weapons.
The greatest defenders of freedom agree that the massacre of children in school or of moviegoers in a theater constitute a grave affront to the security of the country. It has become a crisis that demands a response.
If America were really strong, it would find a way to stop the killings, to staunch the bleeding. But no, America has become weak. The nation has become incapable of solving problems through normal legislative channels.
How strong is that?
The country's political system has fallen into a muddy, sticky, foul-smelling quagmire. Problems whose gravity is enough to produce near consensus among the population cannot seem to find a solution in Congress.
If it's a pure security issue, authorities can order everyone to stay at home in Boston for an entire day. They can ask everyone to send in their iPhone pictures of the marathon to try to solve the case together.
If the problem is national debt, however, the mighty nation produces a travesty like the "sequester," creating hundreds of flight delays for no reason at all other than the incompetence of its politicians.
Or if the problem is regulatory oversight, how strong is a country where parts of a town are destroyed by the explosion of a fertilizer plant that had not had an inspection in more than two decades?
America is in possession of more power than any country on Earth. And yet, its people are not secure. They are dying in large numbers from problems that a better functioning government could do much to prevent.
To make America truly strong and its people safe, fixing this broken system deserves at least as much urgent attention as catching the perpetrators of terrorist attacks.