It’s time the Home Office listed the USA as a risky place to visit for UK travellers

How right your editorial coverage is on yet another school shooting in the USA, the 18th such atrocity in less than 50 days of the new year. A year in which potentially, as in an average year, some 30,000 people will be killed by guns in the USA.

Yet apart from the pleas from some brave Democratic senators, where is the national furore and plan to get rid of the arcane Second Amendment? It’s worse than being in the third world.

If the USA has one of the highest rates of gun crime in the world, then surely the Foreign Office should be providing advice as to the implications of that for the hundreds of thousands of UK citizens who travel to the US every year. Including to the sites of the worst recent massacres in Florida and Nevada. How do the risks of travel to the USA compare to travel to, say, Tunisia, recently re-opened to UK tourists, or parts of Egypt which remain closed?

Maybe the UK should join with its partners in the EU in proscribing Trump’s America, as being unsafe? Or maybe we should, as my wife and I are doing, just boycott travel to the USA until a more rational, inclusive incumbent is in the White House.

L N Price
Horsham

So, Donald Trump thinks school shootings are primarily a mental health issue. I couldn’t agree more. The sooner we get some sanity in the White House in regards to gun control, the better.

G Forward
Stirling

If the children of the USA determined that the circumstances now indicate that their safety is not a priority for those who are supposed to be responsible for their safety, they have a very powerful means at their disposal of making the USA come to its senses. They should refuse to go to school.

Name and address supplied

At this point, I don’t know what to think of the USA’s permanent inaction over gun control. The callous nature of the “thoughts and prayers”, which are routinely doled out to the friends and family of those who have lost loved ones, have ultimately lost their meaning. Even if another president was lost to a gunshot, it would mean nothing. There would be a focus on the person’s mental health issues and not the weapon s/he carries with them. It’s an awful stigmatisation that will probably never end. I sincerely wish it would.

David Murphy
Address supplied

Another heartbreaking school shooting has happened, as one has occurred under every American administration. The gun culture and the easy availability of weapons is the obvious major factor for this national psychosis. But there are other reasons as well, including the lobby strength of the National Rifle Association. It also stems from the absurd belief that gun ownership is a divine American right along with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It also has to do with the ridiculous mantra: “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.

Can I add another reason? Too many Hollywood films are about the glorification of violence. The storyline of most of them is identical: a strong, independent man is consumed with a need to correct injustice. Singlehandedly, or with a few disposable comrades, he makes the situation right by a campaign of violence. Human lives are discarded casually in excessive numbers and without any response from the forces of law and order. In these movies, most of the characters are mere ciphers – non-humans who can be shot, blown-up, burned and drowned because only “Mr Macho” and his crusade matters.

These films are watched by impressionable teenagers who see so many of them during their formative years. In doing so, they may easily confuse fiction with fact. These disturbed youngsters may actually believe that this is how the real world works. So, when they are old enough to get a firearm, they can take their revenge for all the slights and imagined injustices they have suffered in their teen years because that is the way Tom, or Bruce or Vin did it in the movies.

Chris Payne

The Philippines

We should all salute the tremendous strength and endurance of those men who, as boys, were abused by the despicable Barry Bennell. They have somehow found the courage to speak out publicly and we should acknowledge with equal respect all those who were abused and could not speak. I want to say to them all that I am so very sorry – not from guilt; it is not mine – but out of shame, sorrow and, as a parent, heartbreak.

You are so very brave. We are indebted.

Beryl Wall
London W4

I have read the report titled, “I doubt that you have heard of these Pakistani men.” It concerns me that the 12 Rotherham Pakistani men have been charged with violent disorder, even when they were attacked by the far right, while attending a march against racial extremism.This happened following the racist murder of 81-year-old Mushin Ahmed in Rotherham. I support the call for a public enquiry into the racist treatment of the Rotherham 12.

Alan Prentice
Surbiton