Another alien universe heard from: Guns "should be illegal for all but properly constituted, trained and controlled agencies of governments."

A tip of the boonie hat and deep genuflection to Snaggle-Tooth Jones for forwarding a link to this opinion by Professor A.C. Grayling entitled: "What would Breivik be without a gun? The global arms trade inevitably leads to the sort of atrocity inflicted on Norway. The killing machine has to be stopped."

In discussion of the atrocity in Norway last week, there is one subject which has been notable by the almost total silence about it: guns. In response to recurring massacres in American high schools and British villages, in response to footage from Africa and Afghanistan showing ragged, untrained young men brandishing automatic small arms, in response to a man coolly murdering dozens of youngsters in an hour-and-a-half, funfair-like shooting spree on a Norwegian island, where is the outrage at the fact that the world is awash with small arms, that people are making money legally and without blemish to their reputations out of the manufacture and sale of instruments purposely designed to kill?

It is said that you can get a Kalashnikov in the Horn of Africa in exchange for three small children. But before the sale of children for weapons, and before the mayhem and death that results from the use of those weapons, there is the arms trade in a wide range of handguns and high-powered automatic rifles. Every one of these instruments is designed and created for the express purpose of killing. The irresponsible argument of the American gun lobby – that it is not guns that kill, but the people who handle them – is the first point to contest: if Anders Behring Breivik had carried only a knife or a wooden club, he would have been severely restricted in the harm he could do. The same would have been true at Hungerford and Dunblane, at Columbine High School and Kent State University; the agonies of Darfur and Helmand would be vastly less; in fact the world would be a different and happier place if guns were few and their possession a matter of strict official control.

KENT STATE? Huh? Think what you will about what happened there, the arms at Kent State were certainly under "strict official control."

The befuddled professor continues:

Our world stands on its head in most things, but in nothing more so than the fact that a crazy person can buy a gun, an extremely dangerous device, in an American or Norwegian shop, but "drugs" are prohibited and policed at vast expense to society. Indeed, the ironies are still greater: because drugs (excluding some of the most dangerous and harmful, such as alcohol and nicotine) are criminalised but the gun trade is not, the gangs who smuggle the drugs shoot each other with the guns, and not infrequently shoot the policemen who chase them also. This is a stark example of the irrationality of our arrangements. Ban guns and put heroin under the same licensing regulations as alcohol – fools will continue to abuse both, harming mainly themselves: the abuse of guns harms others, and too often too many others – and at a stroke billions of dollars and thousands of lives (think Mexico) would be saved.

Evidently Grayling has not heard of the U.S. government's Gunwalker plot to fuel the Mexican cartels' wars.

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Drawing exactly the wrong inference from the Norwegian massacre: "The only obvious moral is that Norway's relatively strict gun laws should be enforced better. Norwegians need a license to own a gun and must keep them in a safe. Individuals may not buy automatic weapons. Police may inspect a gun-owner's home. Yet plainly, those laws were enforced poorly. The normal reflex, to call for still stricter laws, is less valid here than to take existing law seriously."