There is a lot to be said for gun control

Irish new wave musician Bob Geldof was doing a radio interview in the US in 1979 when the telex machine chattered to life, spewing news about a school shooting.

It pushed him to pen the song I Don’t Like Mondays … the reason the young girl shooter gave for opening fire on teachers and fellow pupils. At the time, the shooting was rare.

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Today, mass shootings – defined as having four or more victims – are so commonplace that the US has experienced 129 of them this year alone.

The latest, on Monday, saw a young woman armed with two rifles and a pistol gun down six people, three of them children, at a church school in Nashville, Tennessee.

Right-wing Americans believe it is their God-given right to “bear arms”, which is a misinterpretation of the constitution, which refers to militia being allowed to keep weapons to defend the country. Yet, even moderate citizens carry, and obtaining a military-grade killing machine is ridiculously easy.

The gun lobby is so powerful in the country that successive administrations, even the most liberal, have failed to tackle gun control. When there are clearly many disturbed people in a society, they must not be allowed access to deadly weapons.

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