The Lake District incident is of course appalling. The man had two legally-held weapons (whether he should have been allowed a licence is now being questioned). However such incidents are extremely rare - there was a school shooting in Dunblane in 1996, and similar incidents to this in Hungerford in 1987 and Monkseaton in 1989. Other than these, I cannot recall any similar occurrences. I was in the Lake District only a couple of weeks ago, and will no doubt return sometime over the next few months - I don't expect to feel threatened, and I certainly don't expect to feel the need to carry a weapon of any kind (even if such a thing were not strictly illegal).

Rather than picking on this isolated tragic incident, of more relevance is the point that in the UK even the majority of criminals don't feel it necessary to carry a gun.

My point is that it appears that a lot of normal, sensible, peaceable Americans, by no means "gun nuts", appear to find nothing surprising about living in a society when they routinely feel the need to arm themselves. Can you not see how weird this is?