Letters to the Editor | 28 April 2007

Shot in the dark

Sir: Just a thought. Has anyone ever considered the possibility that, if all citizens were armed, the Columbine and Virginia Tech perpetrators would have been shot long before they killed so many (Leading article, 21 April)? Moreover, the 9/11 perpetrators would also have been shot before taking control of the aircraft — 130 armed passengers must trump four armed terrorists. Are proposed gun laws not just a vain attempt at treating an effect rather than stopping the cause? If a murderer knows he will be shot if he steps out of line, he will think twice.

Ray Hattingh
Cape Town, South Africa

Sir: There is something else besides the ownership of weapons which separates America from Europe: we don’t do holocausts, we don’t do world wars and we don’t do unelected totalitarian regimes like the European Union.

Katherine Barlow
Austria

Where’s the evidence?

Sir: Melanie Phillips makes virtually no credible claim in her article on the ‘missing’ WMDs (‘I found Saddam’s WMD bunkers’, 21 April). Most of the ‘explanations’ offered are so illogical and irrational as to be laughable. The idea that a cabal of Iraqis, Russians and Syrians could dismantle and transport the massive WMD infrastructure she describes — evading notice by not only satellite and air reconnaissance but also hundreds of thousands of US and British troops and numerous search teams crisscrossing Iraq — is the stuff of a bad Tom Clancy knockoff. Then, after a page and a half of undocumented allegations, lost records, evidence she admits is circumstantial, and wholly improbable speculation, she lets drop the weasel words: ‘Of course, we don’t know whether any of this is true.’

That doesn’t stop her, however, from treating it as true, or from raising the spectre of ‘the Islamic bomb’, although she presents not a shred of hard, corroborated evidence for a single claim made by her source.