It is really quite simple - any civilized society or culture worthy of the name civilized that requires everyone to be armed to "keep the peace" is already well advanced in the process of going down the tubes.

Perhaps the gun free zones such as churches, schools and university campuses are the only havens of relative sanity that are left in the USA.

America's most powerful religious ICON is now the gun. Its motivating "moral" ethos is In Guns We Trust. Its temple is the Pentagon military-industrial-complex, the shadow of which darkens the entire world, and outer space too (increasingly more so). Just as Sauron's MORDOR cast its dark shadow across the entire world of Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings.

Which aint surprising because its entire "culture" is saturated with violence and the ever lurking threat/possibility of violence. Behind such a now all powerful religious Icon is a dreadfully dark vengefull god which demands continuous human sacrifices both at home and abroad.

Your argument is confusing. It seems that you are calling for more guns to be in public areas such as schools and shopping centres. I don't understand how you believe this can prevent more people being killed.

From what I understand many school shootings in the USA have been committed by children or young adults using their parents' legally owned guns. If those guns were no longer available for use by these disturbed people then surely that would reduce the potential for such mass shootings. That seems rather self evident to me.

What I find truly disturbing about the idea of increasing the number of legally permitted weapons being carried in a concealed manner is the potential for so many more casualties and deaths. Instead of one person shooting in one direction at a time (or even sweeping gunfire) you would have two or more with the resultant gunfire coming from as many directions as there are shooters. The average person on the street is hardly going to be a trained sniper so there would be bullets flying in all directions. How could this not lead to even more deaths. And what of the vigilantism this would encourage? People shooting other people for simply carrying a gun, or what they think was a gun? It has happened before

Three quarters of the American people are good guys. They don't need disarming as they are already unarmed. The mongrel who shot the latest batch of victims of the US Second Amendment was a bad guy. So was his mother - a gun freak.

The US Second Amendment was adopted under pressure from the southern planters to be able to quell slave revolts. They could have split the Union unless appeased. Appeased, they eventually did split the Union which inadvisedly fought a devastating war to keep the losers in, then appeased them again, to the enduring detriment of the nation.

In Singapore possession of any sort of firearm means imprisonment and caning. The state means business. Result: gun death rate is 0.02 gun homicides per 100,000 population. In America the figure is 150 times that.

Singaporeans want their five year old children to stay alive all day every day. 25% of Americans don't - not if it means infringing their power to waste others en masse the moment the whim takes them. They make a million weasel excuses like the ones in this article and they are backed by the massive bribe power of the gun manufacturers. The answer to them is not to waste arguments on the 25% but to build up a head of steam among the decent 75% to ensure that being soft on the gunnies is electoral poison.

Garry Mallard,

First time i've heard of an argument that makes a victim out of a person with a gun.
Your definition of "cogent" is far removed from mine.
And of course linked to the Dodge City cowboys is the green conspiracy to take guns away from these big brave men who will somehow be impotent if they can't have their phallic firearm in their hand to ward of those who would "change our way of life" and "threaten our personal liberties".
This is little boy comic book stuff that demonstrates the idiocy of some in our community.

Around 8-9 Americans under 19 die from firearms "every day" in the US...that's around 3,000 of the 31, 000 who die every year from wounds inflicted by firearms in the US.

On 14 December, in central China, a man entered a primary school and started attacking children.

He had a knife. 20 children were injured, some badly. None died.

On the same day, in the US, a man entered an elementary school and started attacking children.

He had a gun. 20 children and 7 adults died.