Bring it out here, Tompkins

There were many stories in the papers last week that have been forgotten after Thursday's events. One of the sillier ones was The Times' claim that "One schoolboy in 10 has carried some kind of gun in the last year".

The story itself has disappeared behind the Times' firewall ("The undiscover'd country from whose bourn/No traveller returns"), but there is a neat dissection of it on The Law West of Ealing Broadway:

The headline suggested that up to a million kids have gone about tooled up, and the reality is that a few hundred, or even a couple of thousand teenage boys have claimed to be dead hard - probably even more claimed to have shagged Billie Piper.