TRIGGER-HAPPY PRESENTS MAY SOLVE OUR WOES

WHAT did you get for Christmas? Pair of socks? Garish jumper? Some kind of soap/deodorant combo suggesting that your personal hygiene over the past 12 months may not have been quite up to snuff?

Well, if you lived in America there is a chance your Crimbo stocking would have hung quite heavily from the mantelpiece.

Because it may well have contained a gun. According to the FBI, over 1.5 million background checks on customers were requested by gun dealers to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System in December. Nearly 500,000 of those were in the six days before Christmas.

It was the highest number ever in a single month, surpassing the previous record set in November.

On December 23 alone there were 102,222 background checks, making it the second busiest single day for buying guns in history. On this side of the Pond, we scoff at such figures.

“Oh, those triggerhappy Yanks and their love affair with guns! What are they like?”

And after the dreadful shooting in Peterlee over the weekend, there are calls for yet-stricter controls on guns. As if it’s possible to legislate against madmen.

Perhaps we should not recoil from guns in quite the way we do.

Tooled

I’d imagine that the shopkeepers who got their stores looted back in August would have found a .38 Smith and Wesson very handy.

The countless off licences, newsagents, Post Offices and bookies that get held up each year could probably find a use for a Walther P99. Or even an Uzi in the more lively parts of our inner cities.

I know I’m kicking off the first column of the year in a controversial manner. Anyone who’s lost a loved one to gun crime would be appalled by suggestions there should be more firearms. But that’s the point.

The criminals are tooled up. Why shouldn’t we have the firepower to shoot back?

We may look at the Yanks as fat, ignorant lunatics. But possibly, they’re not wrong about everything.