THERE are many ways one human being can kill another.
He – sorry, boys, more likely than not it’s a man – can bludgeon them round the head with a blunt instrument; stab them with a sharp one; drown them; run them over with a car; poison them; electrocute them; push them off a high building. Hell, even a single punch can do the trick.
But there is only one way, with the minimum of effort, to be sure to kill lots of people in a short space of time. With a gun.

The recent, terrible events in Virginia, in which a young student shot 32 people before turning the gun on himself, illustrate this perfectly.
Yes, I understand plenty of Americans believe the right to own and bear arms is an important part of their constitution.
Yes, I know Cho Seung-Hui could, feasibly, have made a bomb and blown up half the campus.
Yes, I know if another student had been carrying a gun they might – MIGHT, mind – have been able to foreshorten the carnage.
But that doesn’t change the facts:
The vast majority of killings in the US are carried out using firearms.
In many American states buying a gun is as easy as purchasing a tube of toothpaste.
There will always be people so deranged they want to inflict harm on others, for no reason. Present these people with an easy means of doing so, and they create the kinds of massacres witnessed this week.
It’s simple, really: If Cho Seung-Hui could not have strolled down to the local gun store and bought his weapons over the counter as if they were chewing gum, he would not have caused such loss of life.
Even before we know much about him, we can guess this much: it’s unlikely he would have spent time, effort and money on making a bomb; with a knife he could have killed one or maybe two people before he was stopped; any other way of killing is just pathetic next to the damage a gun can inflict on so many in such a short space of time. Without his guns, Cho may well have killed – but the loss of life would have been so much less.
The sad thing is it seems nothing will change. This incident is just another tragedy to add to the list, notable only by the fact so many died.
America is set in its ways, and the right to carry out violence is so entrenched in its culture the gun law debate has already been raging for decades.
The Boomtown Rats’ song “I Don’t Like Mondays” was written in response to a 1979 school shooting in San Diego, when 16-year-old Brenda Spencer killed two teachers and wounded nine others. Apparently, she had wanted a radio for Christmas. Her father had given her a gun.
When asked why she did it, she replied: "I don't like Mondays. It livens up the day."
Bob Geldof sang back then: “School's out early, and soon we'll be learning,
And the lesson today is how to die.”
Plus ca change...

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