Drugs – and not guns – are to blame for the rise in mass killings, claims Peter Hitchens

According to Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens, drugs may be to blame for the surge in mass massacres throughout the world.

He claims that the absence of conversation about the relationship between drugs and gun violence makes further deaths inevitable in a hard-hitting editorial on Mail+, our new premium sister website.

His remarks come in the aftermath of the murders of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Hitchens writes: ‘Mass shootings of the sort we now see all too often are quite a recent problem. They only really began in the 1960s. Can anyone think of anything else that only really got going in Western societies in the 1960s?’

‘By blaming these events either on the lack of gun control or on some vast Islamist conspiracy or on ”right-wing extremism” we are almost completely missing the point,’ he writes. And these things will keep happening until we wake to the danger.’