Michael Moore seems to be an American version of Philip Adams – loved by his fans on the left, loathed by the right, and also a trifle gravitationally challenged (an occupational hazard of punditry, as I’ve mentioned before). I’ve had mixed feelings about the limited amount of his stuff that I’ve seen. Some was very funny, and some seemed a bit laboured. But I was impressed by a piece of his doing the Internet rounds that my son Leigh passed on to me a few days ago. It starts

“Yesterday, Larry Bennett, a 16-year old, was shot in the head after he was involved in a minor traffic accident. You probably didn’t hear about it because, well, how could he be dead if he wasn’t shot by The Sniper?
Yesterday, an unidentified woman was shot to death in her car in Fenton, MI. You probably didn’t hear about it because she had the misfortune of not being shot by The Sniper.”

The whole article is here

While the consequences of the Monash shootings are still giving rise to near-daily news stories in Australia, the similar, but twice as deadly, shootings in Arizona have already been consigned to the archives in the US (so has Bali, but that’s another story). As this piece from Salon shows, even the sniper attacks have had no real impact on the US debate on gun policy.