It is bad enough to place a bomb in a public area killing innocent civilians, including children, as happened in Mumbai recently, but to deliberately shoot 85 young people attending a summer camp in Norway is an act of cold savagery that numbs your mind. A 32 year old man, Anders Behring Breivik has confessed to carrying out the attack saying that it was " gruesome but necessary ". He is also the person who set off a car bomb near the Prime Minister's office in central Oslo so powerful that it blew out all the windows of the 7 storey building. Yet though the bomb was exploded deliberately in the center of the city with government offices all around it killed only 7 people, injuring many more. Then he went to the tiny island of Utoya armed with an automatic rifle and a Glock pistol and slaughtered 85 youngsters, some probably as young as 14 years of age, by targeting them even as some tried to swim to safety. It was not a random act of an insane person but was planned over many months as shown by his purchase of 6 tonnes of fertiliser in January. This morning we hear that 6 people were shot dead at a skating rink in Texas due to a domestic dispute during a birthday party. The gunman killed himself. This brings us to the question why are guns so freely available all over the world. Why are private citizens allowed to possess such lethal weapons? If all guns were removed from the world there could never be such massacres. Guns kill many more people than bombs yet they are legal. The gun companies cite these atrocities as evidence that guns are needed for self defence. Sell the same thing as poison and antidote. Fantastic logic and we buy it.