BBC Glock

"But surely - and forgive me for being blindingly obvious here - the elephant in the room is the astonishing ease with which a 22-year-old man whose behaviour had caused alarm in his community college, had question marks over his mental stability and who lingered in the darker recesses of the web, was allowed to walk into a shop and buy a gun. And not just any old gun. But a Glock semi-automatic, a weapon designed arguably only for hunting humans.

On some issues, like alcohol consumption and drugs, America is - on the whole - strictly suspicious of the individual's ability to be behave sensibly. But when it comes to lethal weapons, this country is astonishingly permissive and trusting. We are told over and over again that it's the person that kills, not the gun. In the case of Jared Lee Loughner and his semi-automatic Glock, that is clearly nonsense.

In Arizona, the political debate has been particularly heated. But this is also a state where students and teachers are allowed to carry concealed weapons to class. Ironically, this is a freedom which Representative Gabrielle Gifford favoured. The inflamed passions of American politics are unpleasant. But the ability of some deeply troubled individuals to purchase lethal weapons must surely cause alarm. However this aspect of the tragedy has been little debated since the weekend, which to many outside America is frankly baffling."

BBC's Matt Frei

There is, however, reason to think that "heated" does not correctly characterize the rhetoric of Gabrielle Gifford's Republican opponent in 2010.  And he was only one example among many from Florida, Nevada and elsewhere.

The landed gentry who launched the American experiment did not have the kind of divine foresight attributed to them by those now worshipping at the altar of the Constitution - not in that flawed document and not in its Second Amendment.