Guns: The View from Abroad

The great Charles P. Pierce has been in Ireland, sitting in pubs and visiting the race tracks and all those other fun things.  But he weighs in today on the view of epic gun violence from abroad.  Read the whole thing, it's not long, but here's the closer:

But this kind of thing -- an armed madman obtaining deadly weapons legally -- is so pointless that it seems alien. It seems to be taking place in an alternate reality. Other countries simply don't have these events. Or if they do, they have them so rarely that when one occurs, as it did in Australia, the country gets very tough on firearms and changes its laws. The Teachable Moments actually teach something. It is more than odd to be sitting in another country, watching the news scroll by, and to realize that your country, the one that your grandparents braved a leaky boat and the North Atlantic to get to, is a country that has several of these events every couple of years, and accepts them as part of the cost of those essential freedoms your grandparents sought. From this vantage, it is very much like my country is part of another world.