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?”
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