A court case story in the Daily Mirror seemed to say it all. ‘Jilted guns freak killed party guest’ (July 15th). A twenty-year-old Brummie was refused sex by a girl at a party and said he was going to ‘blow someone’s head off’. It was alleged that he then fetched a sawn-off shotgun from his collection of weapons, and when he saw a guest trying to get a pistol-shaped lighter to work he said ‘Like this’ and shot him in the face. The accused was said to be ‘a weak character obsessed with guns and living in a fantasy world.’

This is not the sort of story you find in gun magazines. I read seven different issues for June/July and their combination of know-how and defensive self-righteousness seeks to distance itself utterly from such grisly incidents. But only a self-deluder could divorce them. Reading gun mags gives new meaning to terms like fetishization, alienation and dehumanization.

The gun magazines of Britain and America are the media arm of the ‘gun lobby’ that tries to influence Parliament and Congress and Senate. In this country, their ‘enemy’ seems to be the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers (who enforce the 1968 Firearms Act and the