I don’t often post rants on this Blog because it’s not that kind of place. There are already quite enough websites out there that fill the Internet with ranting on every conceivable topic. This Blog is, I hope, a haven from such places where people can, if they wish, discuss interesting ideas or just stop by for a few minutes to pick up something amusing or occasionally cute. But not today…..

I read the story of the latest killings at Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School which a feeling of here-we-go-again no doubt felt across the world. Yet again we see images of frightened crying children being led out of a school by heavily armed police officers who are themselves getting ready to enter the premises to pick up the pieces of the latest school shooting. Inevitably the arguments over why this has happened (again) are already polarised into the two camps of ‘We must do Something about This’ on one side and the ‘Right to Bare Arms and Freedom from Oppression’ on the other. Inevitably politicians are saying that their thoughts and prayers are going out to all involved and that it is a (yet another) tragedy that we need to come to terms with. One other thing is, in my mind, also inevitable: Once the rawness of the grief has faded and other news items push the story off the front pages of the newspapers and the headlines of the news programmes nothing will change – NOTHING – and in 3, 4 or 6 months someone else will walk into a school and start shooting kids. Children will die because Americans value their Constitution and their Freedom to carry weapons more, apparently much more, than the lives of children. It’s that simple. Compared to words on paper written hundreds of years ago, compared to the opportunity to own something which is only designed with one function – to enable killing from a distance – the life of a child (or in this case at least 20 children) is irrelevant. To me, fortunately living in a different country with an entire ocean between us, it seems incredible – actually unthinkable – that people living in such a country could accept such a situation. It seems to me that the regular (I was going to say occasional but we’re way beyond that now) mass shootings have become part of the background like the local or national weather reports, like storms or hurricanes and that US citizens see it as just another risk to deal with – getting soaked or flooded out during a storm, having a child gunned down in your local school. It’s just another type of random death. Heads are shaken and tears fall after every incident but what can we do about it everyone seems to say. It’s as if the nation has already decided that there is nothing that can be done. So much so that they don’t even debate the point any more. Child mass murder has now, seemingly, become part of the equation of ‘acceptable losses’, as a payment that is reluctantly offered up to enable Americans to be ‘Free’. I think that the only word that describes such a culture is INSANE. Many other countries live without mass gun ownership. Other countries seem to cope with widespread ownership of guns – Canada springs to mind – without the regular killing of its more innocent population. It is, as the irrationally powerful gun lobby says, more than about simple access to guns, but having access to such weapons certainly helps to make these horrors a far too regular occurrence. The only way to reduce such incidents to a truly acceptable level – zero – is to reduce the number of guns to an acceptable level – zero. Of course this will never happen. So the killings will continue, the tears will continue and the justifications will continue. Get used to it if you can.