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I confess that I'm puzzled by a clear and obvious inconsistency.

In the state of Virginia, as in almost all of the U.S., you cannot buy cigarettes unless you are over the age of 18. You can't buy liquor or frequent a booze-selling bar unless you're over 21. And in many states, as in Bermuda, you can't buy liquor from a liquor shop on a Sunday.

But almost any 21-year-old can stride into a gun shop - even on a Sunday - and buy a semi-automatic handgun.

I was in the U.K. when the Virginia Tech massacre occurred. I was thus immersed in the U.K. and European response to that series of horrors. The reaction from that side of the pond usually went to the question of why is it that Americans have such a pressing need to possess guns?

It's clear to every rational thinker that a magazine-fed semi-automatic handgun that has a 15 round magazine can be a very efficient man-killing machine.

Semi-automatic means that every time the trigger is pulled, one death-delivering round is dispatched. So those 15 rounds can be fired off in as few as 10 seconds. Add five seconds for a fast magazine change, and another series of 15 rounds can be loosed off. So in one minute, about 60 rounds can be fired from this type of weapon.

The Virginia Tech shooter is said to have fired a total of 170 rounds.

If this shooting takes place in a target-rich environment - as in a small classroom full of students - it's easy to blaze away and not miss. So killing 30 or 40 people isn't a problem.

The real problem? Are there enough targets? Can each shot be made a kill-shot?

If a shooter kills all the people in one area, he only needs to nip over to another target-rich environment and then get shooting again.

The same thing applies if the person is equipped with a six-shot revolver. The revolver shoots a little slower though and takes longer to re-load and there are far more reloads involved in getting off 60 rounds. So how long does it take? Using a special re-loading device, it would take almost three minutes to get off 60 rounds from a six-shot revolver.

Contrast all of that with a person using a machete or a knife or some other less efficient weapon who accesses the same target-rich environment. By the time he has managed to strike several blows and thus hack one person to death, his environment will be largely targetless because the other targets will flee.

So a madman with a knife or axe or machete is a far less efficient killer. He cannot kill at the same speed as a madman armed with a with a six-shooter and he certainly cannot kill as fast as a madman using a magazine-fed semi-automatic handgun.

There is another important factor. It takes a lot of energy to hack a person to death with a machete. Will there be sufficient energy, even in a psycho-energized madman, to make all the strikes that will kill 30 people?

It's unlikely. Especially as he'll have to chase each of his victims down and then struggle with each of them. It's more likely that he'll either run out of energy or meet his match or be over-powered before he can kill 30 people.

So back to the puzzler. Why is it that personal or individual slow-killers like cigarettes and booze are made so hard to get, while these efficient multi-person-killing handguns are so easily accessible and available?

Commentaries coming out of the U.S. that suggest that so many deaths wouldn't have occurred if every Virginia Tech student was armed leaves me puzzled and twisted.

Surely the problems in Iraq are compounded by the reality that every Iraqi seems to have access to a gun of some kind. Surely we can all see that unbridled access to guns doesn't lead to peace in the streets. If it did, then Iraq would be as peaceful and serene as the Arboretum.

I'm just a simple Bermudian. I am gun-trained. I like guns. I have been handling lethal weapons of all kinds since I was 13. I understand that the combination of a gun and a bullet is a combination designed to kill.

I don't approve of wanton, senseless, mindless killing. So I don't approve of pointless gun ownership.

I need to learn something. Can someone - preferably an American - please explain to me why there is this clear inconsistency over the sale of cigarettes and booze, and the sale of semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles?

[email protected].

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