Why? With 12 confirmed dead, dozens injured and a bloke arrested with a selection of firearms, which can be bought legally like you’re getting a pizza, its hardly leaping off on flights of fancy to piece together a rough approximation of what might of happened, is it?
It’s not hard to get a shotgun licence in the UK, you know. I’ve got 3 in my cellar (2 of which are semi-auto, and can fire their 3-shot capacity in under 0.5s), any of which could cause absolute carnage. I could get a Firearms Certificate shotgun very easily (up to 8-shot capacity) which would, in the wrong hands, be capable of hideous destruction.
There are hundreds of thousands of shotguns in the UK, and yet the death rate from all guns (including illegally held ones) is around 0.46/100,000 people, equating to around 250 deaths per year. Of that, approximately 45 deaths per year are homicides.
The USA, on the other hand, has a death rate of 10.27/100,000 which equates to approximately 31,000 gun-related deaths per annum, of which 12,500 or so are homicides (the remainder are preponderantly suicides, sadly).
It’s all to do with the attitude of the population. Most people in the UK could get a shotgun if they wanted to, but they can’t be bothered. That shows with the statistic that for every 100 headcount there are just 6.2 guns in England/Wales, whereas in the USA there are 88.8. Yep, the US has 14 times the number of guns as the UK per head of population. Simply put, we really don’t want guns, at least not as a general rule, and those of us who have them tend to be very careful with them