As terrible as it is, the news of yet another mass shooting at an American school (there have been 27 so far this year) – this latest, at Uvalde in Texas has almost lost the power to shock us.

President Biden, like every president for the last 50 years has vowed to bring in tighter gun control laws – but I’m not holding my breath.

Every attempt to limit not just the sale of weapons, but the type of weapons that can be purchased on almost any street corner (there are four times as many licensed gun dealers in the US as there are McDonalds) has been blocked by the (National Rifle Association) whose idiotic, tiresome mantra is that ‘it isn’t guns that kill, but people’.

There is absolutely no good reason,in a civilised society, why an 18-year-old can walk into a gun store and buy, with almost no check, a military grade weapon – or any type of firearm, for that matter. The NRA is more concerned over the right of its members to bear arms, than it is over the right of children to survive into adulthood.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way the US government will get enact effective gun-control legislation is to remove the opposition to it and add the NRA to its list of terrorist organisations.

ROBERT READMAN

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