Let’s accept that, (in the Disunited States) we’re “stuck with the guns and instead should focus on the bullets. If we required people to have a licence to buy ammunition, and stamped bullets with serial numbers so that shell casings from crime scenes could be traced back to stores, we could potentially save many lives without infringing anyone’s right to bear arms. It must be worth a go. As the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, the US has a 200-year supply of guns but only a four-year supply of ammunition”.  (Jeffrey Zalles in The Washington Post).

Wouldn’t you think that an idea like this would be embraced by all? What possible objection could anyone have, except, maybe, the additional cost of stamping the bullets. But is the stamping not worth it to trace down murderers and crazy people? What do careful, honest people have to fear? One has to give a reluctant nod to those very effective fear-mongering propagandists, the National Rifle Association – no compromise whatsoever on any matter to do with making killer weapons safer for the population in general. The continued health of firearms sales is more important to them than the safety of people. To Epicurus this would have represented the demise of civilised behaviour.