Stand down from Warp Factor Four, Mr Baker

Well, it seems my guess as to the identity of the mystery visitor from Tucson was bang on the money - Kevin Baker has left a long comment on the previous thread. As ever, let's go through it point by point (weary sigh)...

"I see you're still outstandingly skilled at avoiding the point."

Really? Well, let's recap then. We have a situation where a man driven by a paranoid, hate-filled ideology murders dozens of innocent people with legally-obtained firearms. According to you, the main issue we have to address is that those innocent people shouldn't have run away - and then you accuse others of being outstandingly skilled at avoiding the point? Brazen, Kevin, I'll give you that.

"When rampage shootings occur (almost always in disarmed victim zones) they continue until one of two things happens: the shooter decides he's finished, or a good guy with a gun shows up and stops him. The only other way such shootings stop is when the shooter is overwhelmed by his potential victims."

Kevin, focusing on how shootings stop is a counsel of despair, which if I may say so rather misses the point. What is rather more salient is how they start, or if you like, how they were enabled. This one, like so many others, was enabled by legal access to firearms. It's no coincidence, therefore, that violent gun deaths are disproportionately high not in "disarmed victim zones" as you put it, but in heavily-armed territories such as the one you live in.

"So, "the strictest gun laws in the world" didn't prevent Cumbria's massacre, and Norway's gun laws didn't prevent this massacre."

What a peculiar way of putting it. First of all, to the best of my knowledge the UK's gun laws are not "the strictest in the world" - I believe that honour (and it's a great one) may well belong to Japan. And the UK's laws didn't prevent Derrick Bird carrying out a massacre for a very simple reason - they permitted him to own the guns he used to kill. From which there are only two possible rational conclusions to choose between...

1) The laws weren't strict enough to prevent the massacre, and therefore should be tightened further.

2) The laws weren't strict enough to prevent the massacre, but should be left as they are because the risk of avoidable deaths is somehow outweighed by the right of a minority to enjoy their weapons.

There is no third option that allows you to claim that Bird's murderous actions were brought about by the law denying him access to other weapons - that's logic-bending nonsense, and you know it.

"We bear the primary responsibility for our own safety. The State can help, but the State cannot wrap us in swaddling our entire lives."

In a democracy, we are the masters of the state - it is not a foreign entity. In the UK, we exercise the responsibility for our own safety largely by collective means, rather than the individualistic cowboy tactics you prefer to put your faith in. Which strategy is more successful, and therefore more responsible? The respective violent death rates in our two countries will assist you with that one.

"If you accept that you have a duty to your society, to your fellow-man, then defending them against attack is morally right."

Regardless of which side of the gun debate we fall on, surely the true moral imperative we should be focusing on here is the responsibility of the individual not to kill others. The fact that you seem more interested in the victims' "immoral" actions in doing what they could to save themselves in a state of almost unimaginable stress does, I'm afraid, tell us rather a lot about your philosophy.

"Breivik is at fault here, no doubt about it..."

Well, that's big of you.

"...but the death toll is as high as it is because we no longer teach people - average people - that it's important for all potential victims to be as dangerous as they can. No, we teach them to wait for the State to save them.

And you can see how well that works."

Oh, I can indeed. Homicides in 2009 :

Scotland 79
Arizona 324

Gun deaths in 2009 :

Scotland 2
Arizona 198

Next question?