A culture that glorifies violence and clings tightly to weapons, whatever they may be, will always be doomed to suffer atrocities. It is inevitable. But the issues at play are larger than if a society does or does not keep guns.

Issues such as why Adam Lanza's mental ill health not identified? And how could, in a country with a population 12 times larger than Australia but the same land mass, someone drop-out of society so much as to get to a place where they would do this?

But I do note with interest, and some not inconsiderable respect, the authors note about the civilian 'casualties' that go unreported and unmourned. "Are some children automatically more valuable than others in our eyes?" The answer - of course. If we do not know them and cannot see them then they are valueless to us. If they die, well it doesn't affect me so why should I care? Maybe this explains the issues above - out of sight, out of mind. Even within our own neighbourhoods.

Robert Mcclean you are so right in what you are saying, my first reaction to the American children killed was,well what about all the other children that have been killed through American wars, all children are very valuable regardless of what country they live in. The press frustrate me to their one eyed viewpoints,there are many people now who do not go along with this style of reporting, it all depends which side of the fence you are sitting on, they repot on how good Western society is, doing no wrong and always right, it is utter rubbish. Being such a God given country, American people have along way to go to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, when killing seems to be very high on their agenda. I always thought the Bible said " though shall't not kill" .

Out of sight should never be out of mind, but beware of those gun freaks who are using the out of sight out of mind as a pretext to press for in sight out of mind as well. They really are! Along with the gunnies who ask that attention be switched away from gun homicide to tackling mental illness. All countries have problems of mental illness including that tiny subset of the mentally ill who will use a gun if they can get hold of one. (The vast majority of mentally ill people have no more inclination to violence than anyone else). In one of these - the USA - gun homicide kills nearly 10 thousand people a year. By contrast Britain's tally is now 41. There is no evidence that America has that much more mental illness than Britain, even allowing for the bigger population. The difference is that America is awash with privately owned guns because corrupt judges, corrupt politicians, a clamorous minority of gun freaks and a voracious firearms manufacturing industry have decreed that it be so.

The lame excuses for killing the unborn certainly is a far greater crime in numbers than that of a mentally disturbed individual.The more secular America becomes the more violent. The fact that this young man seemed to live without a father at home again escapes any sort of analysis.

I object to the statement the the US is the statistically the most violent country in the world. This is simply far from true. A quick look at the wiki page listing countries by their homicide rate shows the US somewhere like half way down the list. Honduras, at the top of the list, has a murder rate twenty times that of the US. Nearly all South American and African countries have much higher murder rates. Russia has over twice the homicide rate of the US. The US does have the highest gun ownership rate in the world, but this does not translate into the highest murder rate and far from it.

I liked the article though don't agree with everything in it. I too find the double standards with regards to people being killed highly offensive. We send our soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq for the purpose of killing people. We never seem to consider that these people may mourn their loved ones just the same as we do. Every time an Australian soldier is killed there is a great outpouring of grief. No grief for the Afghans who have died fighting the foreign invaders. Nor for their children who die in the cross fire.
However, to blame the gun lobby and arms manufacturers for the proliferation of weapons in the US does not tell the whole story. America is a democracy and the Americans love their guns. They want the ability to protect themselves and I have some sympathy for that. Although I do not feel vulnerable myself, my wife does. She has no way of protecting herself should she ever be attacked, whether in the home by an intruder or on the street. Whilst statistics would tell us that owning a gun does not make you safer, it certainly makes people feel safer knowing they have the means to protect themselves from people who are younger and stronger than them.

In answer to Robert Le Page:
You have responded to me but don’t seem to have read my questions - merely tried to guess what I’ll say next.

Question: Where does one find a graph of global mean temperature for the past 15 years? Simple enough - it can be year by year or month by month. Just to confirm that GW IS taking place as claimed.

As for the “A” part of AGW, there can be no evidence one way or the other, only correlations. To have any evidentiary significance at all it would have to be shown that temperature change followed CO2 concentration change, not the other way round. Without proof AGW is a political statement, not a scientific one.

Question: Re “precautionary principle” - what social measures (bottom line - not interim with more waiting for disclosure) are proposed on the assumption of AGW? (An addendum – who is supposed to be first cab off the rank for sacrifices? The military? The fuel for shifting goods to countries that can produce them at home? Joe public?).

Question: Re nuclear “solution”: Who pays for insurance premiums to cover Fukushimas? The nuclear energy industry? Subsidiary question: Why do home and contents insurers impose nuclear exclusions?

None of these questions should be difficult for those who call for “action on climate change”.

(Afraid I don’t know of any proof that CO2 isn’t causing observed climate variation. Neither, I fear, do I know of any proof that a teapot orbiting Mars isn’t the cause. Demanding evidence of a negative is fatuous).

Are we all becoming more violent because of Government & Private Corporation rules and regulations, I myself had an incident of a very stupid rule when attending "The Jersey Boys" in Adelaide recently which caused a lot of anger within myself, the anger if one had a gun with them, and if you were that way inclined, could have caused a killing of many people, I ask, if opening a harmless lolly at interval time during a show a crime, according to the management it was, and we were chastised by them accordingly for doing so.
Unfortunately when one enters a Motor Vehilcle registration office and you have to wait an hour to get attended, this then causes stress to many people, same with waiting at hospitals, over crowded buses there are many incidents where anger could override sane thinking and the results could be horrendous to many people.
When we all live in an ideal society where killing is not on any agenda, that is including wars and anything to do with wars whereby mentally and non mentally disturbed people follow their lead of killing, then perhaps peace will come.
Who really was more mentally disturbed than Bush junior, now we have Obama and Gillard on the same bandwagon, lets kill some one anywhere, what does it matter, they are the enemy and disposable. Yes! the young lad in America had problems, but problems caused by a gun culture of lets kill from the President down.
.

The author's rhetoric is just that, rhetoric. It is all proof by assertion. By stating something as though it is fact and hoping that by repeating it often enough the fabrication becomes truth.

The mind control of political correctness relies on Lenin's adage that "A Lie told often enough becomes the truth". Here it is assisted by generous servings of anti-American sentiment. Stereotypes that appeal to the ill-informed and lazy-minded, who read to confirm what their prejudices already inform them could be the truth.

Despite many years of government funded studies, supplemented it is said by money from a certain overseas source (?!), there is no evidence of any positive outcome from the cool $billion spent on Howard's gun buy-back, the ponderous redundant bureaucracy and the white elephant gun registry.

Howard's 'initiative' must go down as the largest single wastage ever of taxpayers' money for no appreciable gain.

For instance, it was found that the incidence of suicide by gunshot, never the preferred nor common method of suicide, was reduced slightly. But then it was realised that victims were chosing other methods instead. Time to ban rope, abolitionists such as the author might say? Likewise the gun crime numbers that were already low in Australia and were already trending down before Howard's 'initiatives', continued to trend down showing no appreciable change post Howard. To be blunt, nothing was achieved at all. Nil. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

However John Howard won a electoral landslide himself and the LNP. It cost a billion of someone else's money, the Australian taxpayer, but hey, don't you worry about that, or where the money might have been better spent. Maybe patients waiting in those ambulances ramped outside hospitals emergency admissions might say otherwise. Or the carers of relatives suffering mental problems who find there is nowhere to place them. The mental health and rehabilitation facilities were previously sold off by Howard (by Labor too).

What the article should be saying is that independent national university research of violence is warranted, not more redundant laws, buy-backs and the like, based on emotional knee-jerk reactions and political opportunism.

Most of the respondents here, like the author himself, seem to have missed an important point: killing children by accident when trying to achieve military goals is quite different from deliberately shooting down seven-year-olds individually in cold blood. If the US drone pilots had known they were about to kill children then I'm sure they would have held back: Lanza, on the other hand, set out to deliberately kill as many children as he possibly could. If you can't see the difference then you need a new pair of moral spectacles.

Yes, 'collateral damage' is a huge and tragic problem; but you don't gain any credibility by linking it with deliberate and purposeful massacres.

There is no difference Jon J, the mentally deranged in society or the deranged in uniform, I am sure if you had children aged say 3 years to six years , I presume you would be saying well done troops, keep the good fight going, never mind me I am so happy my children were killed . get a life Jon, ,all killing is wrong whether Government made or by mentally disturbed people.

Ojnab, I have three relatives who have been in the military, and none of them are 'deranged'; if they were they wouldn't have been employed. They were doing their jobs to the best of their ability, and doing so in the expectation that doing so would ultimately result in fewer deaths and less misery than otherwise. They may have been wrong; but they weren't deranged or deluded, and they were quite capable of understanding and arguing the case for their actions.

If you really think there's no difference between someone doing their best in one of the oldest and most respected professions on the planet and a random gunman, then your moral compass is broken beyond repair.

All those nearly 10,000 firearm deaths a year in the USA compared with around 40 in the UK and around the same in similar countries must be due to something that the USA has that other countries don't. What could it be? Think really hard! Hint: You won't need a PhD in rocket science to figure it out.

The US District of Columbia has the highest incidence of homicide and is twenty times that of Idaho. Columbia has strict laws for gun registration and against concealed carry. Idaho has no gun registration and a permit for concealed carry is available.

It is well known that homicide among young African Americans and Hispanics is far higher than for other groups.

It is known that while some well defined areas have a reputation for homicide and other crime, the great majority of US 'burbs and towns are as safe a seat outside Buckingham Palace with the Bobbies standing by. Probably safer. Which is a worry when there is a very rare multiple homicide/suicide in a US town or suburb not known for violence. The media's contribution to encouraging copy cat murder/suicides needs to be examined very closely.

Plainly there is much more going on with violence and crime than the availability of firearms, knives, fuels, explosives and so on. It would seem to be rooted in economic, social and cultural problems. However that is not something that many politicians and the elites who advise them would want to know about. Politicians lurch from term to term and there is the persistent media circus to concern them.

I stridently object to Jon J's assertion in regards the military collateral deaths, in fact I would put it the other way round. Having the weight of law (perversely, that law has a gun behind it) on your side makes those deaths all the more repugnant, as there is no come back of any substance.

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?" - Mahatma Gandhi

1000's of child deaths each year in New Guinea because we would rather spend the money on War then vaccination puts us in a place I feel VERY uncomfortable with. We place little value on the deaths of many, we value theatre.

That aside, I enjoyed the article albeit I disagree with the sentimental reflection about John Howard's Gun Policy, I bought the twaddle then but time and reflection sees it as nothing but political rhetoric.

With all the broh-ha-ha I have decided to investigate myself, get a gun license, attend a safety course and intend to purchase a couple rifles.

How very true Valley Guy, we seem to be so preoccupied with killing each other rather than humiterian needs throughout the world, and there are many, even our Monarchy members must have military training, goodness only knows what for, they would never ever be in the front line of fire,but when one views the medals on their chests for so called bravery,it leaves me cold, perhaps a course in mental problems or making the world better in some way would be a far better way to go, rather than a course in how to kill human beings, I also have had training in how to kill people, which was Prime Minister Menzies sponsored many years ago. War is as bad as a mentally deranged gunman and children will suffer the same fate in both, that is dead for no reason of their making.

Emperor Julian,
The U.S.A isn't one nation, you can't use the different homicide rates in different areas to get an average and declare a problem across the board.
The heavily African areas of the U.S have by far the highest murder rate their societies resemble Africa in that regard,Louisiana and Mississippi are often described as third word countries.
The heavily Mexican south western areas are less violent but still have roughly three times the murder rate of northern states, they resemble Mexico or central America.
Hartford and Sandford Connecticut have a slightly higher murder rate than Melbourne or Sydney, it's about 3.5 per 100,000 to our 3.1, but again, Hartford is 13% African and 39% of all homicides there occur within that community.
If you look at averages the picture is grim but the point I'm making is that we don't normally look at Europe, with it's diversity of ethnic groups and take averages as proof of one thing or another, that'd be stupid, no one would take it seriously right? So why do it with the U.S.A?

Apologies,
Stamford, Conn, not Sandford..I keep doing that for some reason.
BTW,
The private school which the Obama children attend reportedly has eleven armed guards on duty every day (Malia and Sasha of course have their own secret service detail), that's been their policy for many years.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/12/23/School-Obama-s-Daughters-Attend-Has-11-Armed-Guards-Not-Counting-Secret-Service

Excellent article - thanks. I agree with the posters who understand that murder is murder, and state sponsored killing of people we decide to invade, by trained killers - not ourselves - we keep our hands clean, is worse than some poor guy with a grudge who at least did the murdering himself and then had the courage to kill himself afterwards.