Bulletproof logic? Not among the gun-toting citizens of Milwaukee

Guns make people safe — and the more guns you have, then the safer life is. It’s an article of faith in the united states, where the right of every family to hoard enough firepower to fight a war is enshrined in the Constitution.

You’d have a better chance of convincing the average American to accept communism and compulsory sex changes than of persuading him to lay down his guns.

Louis Theroux took the brilliant decision not to question this, in the horrific final episode of his Dark states series, Murder In Milwaukee (BBC2). never once did he suggest that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms’ laid down in the second Amendment was an open invitation to slaughter.

He simply pointed his cameras at the carnage on the streets of an American city and let us draw our own conclusions.

At some point in this programme, every sane viewer will have decided that u.s. gun laws as they stand are licensed madness. It might have been in the opening scenes, when a harassed mum explained how she settled a local dispute over a child’s tricycle: she took a shotgun and blasted holes in her neighbour’s car.

Or it might have been the pious 16-year-old who declared that he did not possess a gun, because that would be illegal: he wouldn’t be old enough for another two years. Anyhow, he didn’t need his own gun — he’d been proficient with his mother’s arsenal of rifles and pump-action shotguns since he was seven.

Maybe some viewers baulked at the posse of musicians mourning their dead friend, a rapper called Blizz. He was shot in the head outside their studio. If only he’d been armed, he could have scared off his assailant, they said.

Louis asked what the boys liked to carry. They produced a highvelocity rifle with a sniper sight. It was the size of a bazooka, and completely legal in Milwaukee.

For me, the real terror of the programme lay in the background noise — the constant sound of sirens, punctuated by explosions like firecrackers. Ordinary people in their front yards barely flinched at the sound of gunfire.

When a couple of rounds were loosed off from a passing car, at a family having a barbecue, one woman just shrugged and muttered: ‘so disrespectful.’ Most of Louis’s interviewees were black and few of them trusted him enough to say very much.

This was probably because Louis had a police escort at all times, and was wearing a police-issue bulletproof vest. You wouldn’t want to walk around Milwaukee without one.

Violence of a less sickening sort was unleashed as Robot Wars (BBC2) returned, for more radio-controlled battles between mechanised monsters.

unless you’re a 13-year-old boy torn between the twin thrills of construction and destruction, it’s hard to feel much enthusiasm for this show.

The bouts of metal-mangling are expertly filmed, but when a team of tubby engineers emerges amid dry ice, all scowls and attitude, and the voice of doom announces, ‘From Hemel Hempstead, Behemoth!’ . . . well, it’s faintly pathetic.

A junior doctor called James from Hereford did bring a splash of satire to the programme with his flimsy contraption called Donald Thump.

The Donald was a weird orange, with a wig of ragged straw that James removed before battle, in case it fouled the wheels. Despite waving its weapon around quite indiscriminately, Donald Thump proved to be erratic, ineffectual and prone to self-combusting.

Eventually its front fell off and all the inner workings were exposed. satire indeed.