Latest update: 15/12/2011
Should gun controls be tightened?
When lone gunman Nordine Amrani opened fire on holiday shoppers in the Belgian city of Liege on Tuesday, the authorities were caught on the backfoot. Although Amrani was already known to police, he had no signs of mental illness and even those closest to him are struggling to comprehend Amrani's actions. The attack comes just months after Anders Behring Brevik shot dead dozens of Norwegian youths. Now, experts are calling for European gun laws to be reviewed.
React to the article
(1) Reaction
gun control
No.
We have strict gun control in the UK, has it stopped mass shootings? No.
Names of the locations here in the UK ring as loudly as those across the face of the globe, Dunblane, Hungerford, Cumbria to name a few of te more notorious events.
Those were multi killings by one person, then, extending back over the last hundred years or so there are many hundreds of individual murders by firearms.
Among the more well known are.....
Ruth Ellis, hanged for shooting her lover
Bentley, for being an accomplice in the killing, by gun,
of a policeman.
and a whole series of the same over then last six or seven decades
Does gun control work?
Obviously, here in the UK, it seems not to.
I can see nothing to be gained from a kneejerk reaction to these recent events in Liege and Norway.
What I can see is just another tranche of misguided do do-gooders wanting to hand the public's right to own, and sensibly use, a firearm, over to yet another tranche of control freaks,