Guns Are America's Blind Spot; In Britain, It's Health Care

We live in a small world. There are in fact just two degrees of separation between you and someone who attended the concert in Las Vegas last Sunday at which Stephen Paddock killed 58 people. That is because you are reading my column and my son’s nanny was there with a group of her friends. (Luckily, she left before the shooting began, and none of her friends was hit. Spattered with the blood of others, but physically unscathed.)

One of many pathologies of a small world is groupthink. I arrived in London shortly after the Las Vegas massacre. I encountered unanimity, right across the political spectrum. Americans are crazy, I was repeatedly told. How can you live in a country where such things are possible?

Now it is true that America has a gun problem, but it is not quite the problem most Britons imagine. As the London Times pointed out last week, more Americans have died from guns in their own country since 1968 than have perished in combat in all the nation’s wars (including the Civil War). On average between 2011 and 2014, guns were linked to 34,000 deaths a year in the United States.