Christine Jardine uses her Scotsman column this week to write about the awful shooting in Maine last week and the culture in the US which allows these tragedies to occur on an all to regular basis.

She described a trip to an American supermarket 7 years ago

Walking into a general store and seeing rifles on open display along one wall stopped me in my tracks.

In a small town in Virginia, with the cool, laid-back vibe of a Happy Days episode, lethal weapons were on sale alongside the fruit and veg.

uddenly small-town America seemed a very strange and potentially dangerous place.

I had experienced the States’ casual relationship with guns and its consequences once before.

As a young journalist I had been sent to Texas to cover the death of a young Aberdeen oil man in an inexplicable shooting incident in Houston.

But this was different. I felt threatened.

I have long been mystified that the country does not recognise gun control as the solution to the loss of life which bedevils their culture.

She looks at the shocking statistics:

What is freedom really if you are scanning for danger doing the weekly shop, or keeping an eye on the exits on a night out?

The statistics are cold. More than 35,000 deaths and 500 mass shootings where more than four people have died so far this year. We shouldn’t forget that 19,000 of those were suicides.

The United States is the only country in the world where civilian guns outnumber people.

And the scary thing is that we are so used to it:

Maybe it’s because the news reports follow the same pattern. Flashing lights, sirens, people running and: ‘Oh, it must have happened again’.

Even here it feels as though we are no longer as shocked. I was with a group of people who all paused to look at the breaking news on the TV on Thursday.

After an almost audible tut we carried on with our day.

You can read her whole article here (£).

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