Sir, The Virginia school massacre has predictably led to calls for more laws. But the only effect of gun laws is to disarm the law-abiding while leaving madmen and criminals with firearms.

In June 2005 a Virginia Tech student, who had a gun carry permit, took a firearm on to campus and was disciplined. The university governing board stated that they would never allow employees or students to carry firearms on campus for self-defence and publicly announced that it had disarmed everyone on campus: apparently everyone except the student with massacre on his mind.

Gun laws are part of the problem, not part of the solution. They did not prevent Dunblane or Beslan. Ordinary people need to have the means of self-defence. The school shootings that were quickly stopped by armed citizens never get much attention — such as those at Pearl, Mississippi, and Edinboro, Pennsylvania.

STEVE DEVEREUX, Dar es Salaam

Sir, Surely any tightening of the sale of firearms in America would be largely pointless given that there are already more guns in circulation than people. If the supply of ammunition were made illegal it would simply be pushed underground.

America’s lack of success at restricting drug sales and consumption suggests this would not lead to dramatic reduction in access, merely a reduction in tax revenue.

HUGH BANKIER, Tunbridge Wells

Sir, Mr Schollick’s suggestion (letter, April 18) that the Second Amendment is outdated now that “security” is the job of the police and the FBI misses the point of the amendment.

It was written to ensure that free citizens could defend themselves not just against foreign invaders, but against their own government, should it become despotic.

It is an argument we might take seriously if we consider the 20th-century regimes that proved particularly keen on gun control: the Ottoman Empire in 1915; the Soviet Union in 1919; the Nazis on coming to power in Germany in 1933; Pol Pot in Cambodia and Mao in China.

We can sneer all we like at the American gun lobby, but I doubt that anyone will ever try herding their children on to a cattle truck.

GERVASE PHILLIPS, Principal Lecturer in History Manchester, Metropolitan University

Sir, It is often said by Americans that non-Americans can never understand the depth of feeling among many in the US about the right to bear arms. But I think that in Britain many people now understand all too well the reality of a large civil government holding the monopoly of force.

The British Government is increasingly becoming a threat to the lives, liberty and property of its citizens: sexual orientation regulations, environmental policy, ID cards, the smoking ban and the surveillance society. Nevertheless, few of us would consider the restricted access to guns in Britain an assault on our liberty. Our liberty is, in fact, preserved by legislation that restricts others on our streets from holding guns.

NICK WELDON, Enfield, Herts

Sir, George Bush was wrong to say that the students at Virginia were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The students were in the right place at the right time, but the university, the police, and the country failed to provide them with the protection they deserved.

MIKE DRISCOLL, Adelaide

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