Letter from Washington DC: Guns don't die. People do

“We must stop walking down the American path of gun culture.” That one statement distils the essence of the collective will to reform Australia's gun laws that developed after the massacre of 35 people at Tasmania's Port Arthur. Australia's prime minister, John Howard, gave it early prominence—“The governments of Australia decided that this country was not to go down the American path,” and nearly every editorial writer, columnist, and radio host in the country repeated it endlessly. It became the argument that short circuited the need for any other explanation.

I have just spent five weeks in the United States working on a book analysing the passage of Australia's new gun laws inspired by the Port Arthur massacre. The American path motif was hard to ignore. Gun deaths here are an obvious place to start. Apart from Colombia—where soccer players can get killed for an own goal—and (interestingly) Russia, no other country outside a war zone comes near to the USA when it comes to gun deaths.