Guns don't kill people. Art does.

...this week in the form of Gerard Kaufman (I defy anyone to stand up and be counted who doesn't find this man the most jumped-up and obsequious little turd still refusing to be flushed in the bowl of British politics). He pontificates for our edification:

The most chilling aspect of the Virginia Tech massacre is that its perpetrator, Cho Heung-sui, a South Korean, was directly inspired by a recent South Korean splatter movie, Oldboy

- not the killings then. Or US gun law. Or that the video nasty crusaders crawl out from under their rocks again, having hibernated long enough, yapping 'Ban!' 'Burn!' with missionary glee upon the reflections of a violent world, proclaiming them as causes.

Whilst it's incidental, I can't help remarking that the particular film chosen as primum mobile here happens to be more akin to a Greek revenge drama than a 'splatter movie', and at no stage involves butchering students. Not that research into details was ever felt necessary by anyone embarking on these crusades. Zeal is quite sufficient.

This is also well in line with the self-serving nature of the politicised media, as with The Independent's recent breathtakingly cynical volte-face over cannabis decriminalisation - a stance is boldly proclaimed one year, the paper making its own opinion the news, to serve as the news again when the stance is reversed.

To elaborate, in that particular case 'scientific breakthroughs' establishing a causal link between skunk and mental illness were used to facilitate this radical shift. Not only was this fundamentally dishonest as the writers of the original pieces were doubtless fully aware of the potential of cannabis to cause mental instability in some individuals - they're Independent writers, for Christ's sake - but also in that skunk was then painted out to be a whole new drug, instead of merely a potent form of cannabis with a history stretching back decades...here, incidentally, the preposterous factoid that it was '25 times more powerful than the cannabis used by previous generations' was again trotted out, which would mean that all people were actually smoking back in the '60s was oregano. See here for a concise dissection of this ballpark figure malarkey. Oh, and if you're interested in laying the whole cannabis debate to rest once and for all, read this.

The cherry-picked data is then usually bolstered with a scattering of parental testimonies of children with mental disorders, with the option of a few stories leading off to heroin/suicide. And thus the point is proven. And thus the news eats itself.

Creationism is still popular because it provides a tidy, holistic, bite-sized answer to the big questions of origins and purpose, and one that can also be understood without any need for time-consuming study or analytical intelligence. We are here because of God's design. Likewise, our young go mad because they watch films or take soft drugs.

Just don't take away our guns. Man is not free without the freedom to kill.