Like most people in Britain I am nervous about the idea that people should be allowed to carry guns. My grandfather was a gamekeeper, so I have lived with guns, handled guns, discharged guns and cleaned guns. I just don't like the idea of any crackpot carrying them near me.

But this article by Richard Munday reminds us just how recent Britain's anti-gun legislation really is. In 1896, the police actually borrowed pistols from passing pedestrians to bring a pair of gun-toting 'anarchists' to book! Licensing came in in the 1920s, but it was not until the late 1940s that things got really restrictive.

Munday goes on:

For a long time it has been possible to draw a map of the United States showing the inverse relationship between liberal gun laws and violent crime. At one end of the scale are the "murder capitals" of Washington, Chicago and New York, with their gun bans... at the other extreme, the state of Vermont, without gun laws, and with the lowest rate of violent crime in the Union (a 13th that of Britain).

I'm not pleading to end gun control in Britain. But I do think that this is yet another example of where politically popular laws, inacted in the wake of some major misfortune - a financial scandal, a rail crash, whatever - actually seem to do the opposite of what was intended. The trouble is, by the time you have discovered that, you are in a right mess and just undoing the law is not necessarily going to get you back to where you were.

One thing is clear. Whatever the issue is, we need to study the evidence before we let legislators loose on us. Perhaps we should make it a rule that, whatever the scale of the public outrage, there should be a gap of at least two years between the introduction of a law and the incident that made people call for it. Then maybe cooler heads will rule.