By: Mike Hosking | Monday, July 23, 2012 9:45 AM

I wonder how many people in Colorado who thought that having free access to guns before this weekend still do.

It’s not exclusively the domain of the Americans but the mass killing does seem to happen to them more than anywhere else. I wonder how many of these have to happen before enough people connect the dots and work out that a lot of guns will inevitably lead to them ending up, at least some of the time, in the wrong hands.

I wonder if there are still Americans who think that it won’t happen to them. Is America big enough for all these shootings to unfold and you still think it won’t happen to you? Is America so big that those who argue for guns can rationalise in their minds that a few mass killings is still an isolated incident.

Or maybe they argue even if you did tighten up the gun laws, those who want to kill still would find a way of doing it. Or maybe they take that very purist view that it’s not actually the guns that are the problem. The guns don’t kill, it’s the people and if they can convince themselves it’s purely the people then maybe they can go down the whole wider society argument. People being disenfranchised, people being isolated.

But surely the wise heads would be able to point out that even if the disenfranchised argument was real, in reaching out to lash back at society, maybe it wouldn't be quite so catastrophic. If all they could find when they lashed out was something that didn’t have the ability to kill 20 people a minute, if guns weren’t so prevalent they wouldn't be able to stash them. If the gun lobby wasn’t so strong, owning semi-automatics would actually seem absurd as opposed to normal.

Also down that purist line would be the argument why should the normal law abiding citizen be inconvenienced by the actions of a few nutters which I assume in theory makes sense until you look at Aurora. If having seen that and you can’t rethink your view, then maybe those people are as nutty as the killers.

From this distance what makes the American gun debate so baffling is that unlike here where your pro-gun advocate would argue the right to be able to go hunting for food or at least recreation, exercising their right to be in the great outdoors. In the states it’s an entirely more sinister stance. Most of them have their weapons under the pillow so other people with their weapons under the pillow don't shoot them. In other words they’re frightened for their lives.

They’re only frightened for their lives because too many people in Washington decided that being able to have a gun under your pillow was a good idea in the first place, not ever thinking long enough to realise that once basically everyone had a gun, they’d then want another one. Because given everyone had one at least some of those who had them would use them for the wrong reasons.

And so we arrive at Aurora.

Photo: Flowers are laid in remembrance of those who died in the Colorado shooting (Getty Images)