Last Friday 20 children and six adults were shot dead at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The same day a group of schoolchildren was attacked in China’s Henan province. There, the assailant wielded a knife and the result was injuries to 23 children and an adult but no deaths. This follows an established pattern. Like the US, China has experienced a spate of attacks on schoolchildren. But without easy access to guns, Chinese attackers seldom succeed in killing.

America’s inability to protect the public from gun violence is a case study in several of our democratic failures: the single-issue minority that overrides the weaker preference of the majority; the inbuilt rural bias of our politics; the entrenched power of a well-endowed lobby; and the runaway interpretation of certain politically congenial rights by a conservative Supreme Court majority. Because of the scale of these systemic obstacles, liberals like Barack Obama, who are naturally inclined to support sensible gun-control laws, have in recent years shied away from taking on the issue.

If that is to change there are two possible paths to reform. The first is a civil rights, or moral model, along the lines of the campaign for gay marriage or the recent executive order ending deportation of illegal immigrants who were brought to the US as children. The other is a public-health model, used to curb smoking or promote seat belts, where better policy advances through regulation, litigation and incremental political change at multiple levels.