by ED PILKINGTON
The next time you happen to be in Arizona drinking a cool beer with some time on your hands, ask the person along the bar to describe for you the Glock 19. Likelihood is he will know what you’re talking about, as gun ownership rates in Arizona are among the highest in the world. He might even be packing himself, as it’s legal in the State to carry concealed weapons into bars.
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What is it with America and guns? Why does the most advanced democracy, which prides itself on being a bastion of reason and civilisation in a brutal and ugly world, put up with this carnage in its own back yard? Why does it tolerate the sea of blood that flows from gun incidents, with about 100,000 people killed or injured every year? Why does it accept an annual murder rate by guns that is 13 times that of Germany and 44 times that of England and Wales? People tend to remember the low points, such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. But do they know that since those two men hit the floor, more than a million people have been killed in the U.S. from the barrel of a gun? Every time a gun massacre happens in America, the pattern seems to be the same: initial bewilderment is followed by outrage, calls are made for a renewed look at the country’s almost uniquely loose gun laws, and then . . . nothing. If anything, says Josh Sugarmann, head of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center, U.S. regulations have become even more relaxed since Virginia Tech.
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