Re my post on the Scotland On Sunday chap below: Yes, yes, I know the B52 wasn’t introduced till the 1950s, but c’mon, he got the numeral of the war right.

Mr Massie writes to point out that his own view of US gun culture can be found in the first piece he filed on the VT massacre for The Scotsman (may require a credit card purchase in Scots farthings or groats or euros or some such):

As Jim Webb, the Vietnam hero who was elected to the Senate last November, writes in Born Fighting, his history of the Scots-Irish in the US, the people here “are a culture founded on guns, which considers the Second Amendment sacrosanct, while literary and academic America considers such views not only archaic but also threatening”… If Webb is right – and I think he is – then the gun is an inescapable part of America’s sense of itself. If the colonists had not been armed, they could not have rebelled against King George. Such sentiments may seem anachronistic or even callous in the wake of the worst mass shooting in US history, but no attempt to understand why America, alone of western countries, remains an armed society can hope to be successful without appreciating the historical – and constitutional – place the gun has played in its history.

For a British paper, that’s more robust than my old pals at the Telegraph are these days.