Unfettered access to guns

Another massacre, another reason to be thankful we live in a country “free from the deadly gun obsession that grips the U.S.,” said the Daily Mirror (U.K.) in an editorial. In the wake of the tragedy in Colorado, where James Holmes killed 12 people during a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, our sympathy goes out to the victims’ families. Britain has had little experience with shooting deaths since we banned all handguns in the wake of the 1996 school massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, when a man armed with four pistols killed 16 children and an adult. Assault rifles and automatic weapons, it should go without saying, have been banned since the 1930s. Last year, 51 Brits were killed with guns—orders of magnitude less than the carnage in the U.S., where 31,347 were killed in 2009.

Yet Americans pay this horrific price with scarcely a murmur, said Adrian Hilton in the Daily Mail. It’s not just the massacres that occur with regularity. Tens of thousands of individuals are gunned down by their fellow Americans every year. “If these had been assaults by a foreign power,” any president, whether Republican or Democrat, “would most likely have treated them as declarations of war and responded accordingly.” But this homegrown terrorism is simply accepted. “What kind of society is it that seeks to ban big sugary drinks in order to reduce obesity, while doing nothing to limit access to the pistols, rifles, and guns which kills thousands every year?”

The gun lobby has the country firmly in its grip, said Jean-Vincent Russo in Le Télégramme (France). The National Rifle Association spends torrents of money, “to great effect,” pressuring elected officials. Politicians who favor limits on guns are either cowed into silence or flipped. Republican hopeful Mitt Romney, for example, said in 1994 that he favored banning certain guns, but now he stands firmly with the NRA in opposing all restrictions on firearms. It’s no wonder the gun-makers want to protect their industry—they claim it is worth $28 billion and some 180,000 jobs. But Americans should realize that the industry is “a scourge” they’d be far better off without.

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American gun defenders sound downright brainwashed, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times. They claim that to call for stricter laws is to somehow exploit the victims for political gain. “Pardon? If a ship sinks and I make the case for greater safety in maritime affairs, I am not taking any sort of political stance.” It’s just common sense. How can Americans, so clever at so many things, fail to grasp this simple fact? “The United States still remains a very, very foreign place.”