Dr Beverley Roos-Muller is a writer, media worker and former academic lecturing in Humanities at UCT. She was a full-time anti-apartheid political activist in the mid-1980s. She is the co-author, with her late husband Prof Ampie Muller, of 'Vuur in Sy Vingers' about his father-in-law, the poet NP Van Wyk Louw. She has recently completed an intimate account of the Boer War using previously unpublished Boer material.

The posture that 'it's not guns that kill' is akin to suggesting that it's not arsenic that kills, but the poisoner. Yes, poison is administered by an individual, but there's a very good reason why arsenic is not readily available in shopping malls.

As the small bodies of 19 children between the ages of seven and 10 were carried out of their elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, anxious parents were being asked to give DNA samples, even as their legs collapsed beneath them. Another lone gunman had killed them with ruthless efficiency, using an assault weapon.

Another day, another mass school killing: this is, astonishingly, a literal truth. There have been 212 mass shootings in the US so far this year, as I write. By the time you read this, that number may...