Well of course many people in the US are worried about violence. They see frequent cases of mass shootings on TV, sometimes in places they know or places much like the place they live or work. They see the Police officers getting gunned down, or gunning unarmed people down on an almost daily basis. If I live in a society like that I’d be pretty paranoid too.

But is the solution to this problem mass gun ownership? I think more and more school children in America are beginning to realise that actually no, that’s not the right way to think about this.

Is it really sound to compare the USA to Somalia and Afghanistan as though that comparison is just as relevant as a comparison to the UK or Australia or Canada? How many democratic countries have suffered revolutions and mass social breakdown? All of a sudden you end up with a very short list, and usually within a short period of time of coming out of a dictatorship of some kind, before democratic institutions and processes have become established. How many that have been democratic for more that 50 years? I can’t think of a single one.

Finally about 30,000 Americans die by the gun every year, many by suicide but that just goes to show the risks of easy access to guns. (If you disagree - people could stab themselves to death instead - compare death rates with other stable affluent democracies. You might be able to explain away some of it but I’m already rounding down to the nearest 10k.) Let’s say you have one uprising every 150 years. To pay it’s way in blood gun ownership would have to be responsible for saving over 450,000 lives. That’s about half the total of the Civil War. I think it’s far from clear that this would be the case, and surely isn’t having huge numbers of firearms in circulation more likely to make such a tragic breakdown of society even worse?