Kim du Toit, a regular commenter on these parts with a blog of his own, links to this story about a self-defence shooting in Dallas, Texas. Just scroll down and read the comments from the cop at the end. Absolutely superb.

The left-leaning Observer newspaper (UK), meanwhile, carries a hostile piece about gun ownership in the US and the amount of gun crime there. The problem is that the article does not really take into account the rather glaring fact that in Britain, a country with the fiercest gun laws this side of Alpha Centauri, there has been a lot of gun crime in our cities lately.

Here is an except:

An average of almost eight people aged under 19 are shot dead in America every day. In 2005 there were more than 14,000 gun murders in the US - with 400 of the victims children. There are 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents in an average year. Since the killing of John F Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century.

The problem with all these sort of statistics, I reckon, is that they need to be put into context. Cultures matter: in parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, gun ownership among the adult population is widespread, but gun crime is low, and that fact cannot just be attributed to all that healthy Alpine air. In the US, gun crime is closely linked to drug gangs, and I gently venture to suggest that the War on Drugs, which is a disastrous policy, is the culprit. The statistics given by the Observer - it provides no source - do not tell us whether gun crime is rising or falling, or is stable, or what other categories of crime are like. Nor does it adjust for population levels to compare with other countries where gun ownership might be quite high. It may of course be that some crime, such as acts of domestic violence, would drop if gun ownership was outlawed, but what would happen to things like domestic burglary, for example? I certainly would not want to burgle anyone's home in Texas for the fairly obvious reason that I would end up very dead.