Tuesday, September 24th ....

I've always been fascinated by numbers and I think that's one of the reasons I enjoy books by Lee Child. You can be sure that in every book, there will be some interesting facts about numbers, like the most recent I've read which points out that if you divide 1 by 81, the answer is 0.12345679 recurring forever. Other people might say, who cares? I'll accept that but it interests me.

Sometimes I come across some interesting statistics like the ones in a Guardian article on Sunday. The author was scratching his head about the US lunacy about gun ownership and he threw in some numbers to give some sort of context. Baldly, some 32000 people die every year in US from gun shots but it's much more telling to look at the numbers who have died in the past 45 years from being shot by privately-owned guns and it's almost 1.4 million! Since the world was shocked by the death of Robert F Kennedy in 1968, 1.4 million other Americans have been shot and died. That's more than have been killed in every war in which Americans have fought since 1775. It's madness.

If 32000 people were being shot every year in an African country, the UN would be calling for intervention.

It's extraordinary how Americans seem to be blind to the reality of the problem. It's like their focus on the War on Terrorism. Since 2001, the US has spent over $360 billion on the fight against terror. It must be working because fewer that 20 people have been killed by terrorists in those 12 years. But 364,000 people have been shot by other Americans in that time.

Surely it's time for a change. It was sad to see President Obama wearily commenting on the latest horror in the US, knowing that he can do nothing about it.