PETER HITCHENS: If you think the horrific rise in mass kilings is down to terrorism or gun ownership, you're wrong. This is the REAL cause of the epidemic of bloodshed...

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Last Monday TV screens lit up with bright red 'BREAKING NEWS' alerts, as word came in that someone had driven a car into crowds in the western German city of Mannheim. He killed two people and injured many more. Yet in a couple of days the entire event had vanished from headlines and, like many other such horrors, will probably sink into obscurity.

This is because even by the greatest stretch the killings cannot be made to look as if they were a terror attack or the work of a migrant. Even the usual dubious eyewitness claims that the perpetrator had shouted 'Allahu Akbar!' were missing.

Reuters news agency reported the suspect was a 40-year-old German man. They noted 'he did not appear to have been politically or religiously motivated'. Instead, the local prosecutor said there were 'reasons to believe he was psychologically unwell'. No surprise.

If we examine all the rampage killings in the world, which have become so frequent since the 1960s, the key thing they have in common is a deranged perpetrator. Often he (it is usually he) can be shown to have been a user of various mind-altering drugs, generally SSRI 'antidepressants', steroids or marijuana. Often this is simply likely but unproven.

Police cordon off the scene in the western German city of Mannheim, where a man drove a car into crowds, killing two people and injuring many more

In the USA, they're seldom classified as terror acts. The perpetrators are usually American-born. So the anti-gun lobby use these tragedies to campaign for gun control. As mass ownership of guns has been legal in the USA for centuries, this does not explain why such killings have become so common in recent years.

It's the mirror image of the European response, where the culprit is automatically claimed to be some sort of terrorist, despite the fact that most of them are plainly unhinged, solitary killers with no coherent political aim.

When, in the USA, the killer uses a car (as sometimes happens) you hear little of it because the gun issue isn't involved. When, in Europe (as sometimes happens) the killer is obviously neither a migrant nor a terrorist, it likewise drops out of the news.

Media, politicians and others are simply missing the key common factor on both sides of the Atlantic, which is mental illness following drug use.

Is this perhaps because so many influential people in America and Europe are past or present users of legal or illegal drugs, and don't want them restricted?

Aren't you enjoying the longer days and the lighter evenings? I certainly am. Yet this has nothing to with the clocks going forward (that doesn't happen for three weeks). It has just happened naturally, as it always does. So why, on March 30, must we endure – yet again – this pantomime in which we falsify every clock and watch in the kingdom? Most people understand this so badly that they don't know whether the clocks go backwards or forwards. We do know this imposed springtime jetlag makes people ill. But what good does it do? I regard it as an annual intelligence test. Anyone who can actually understand it wants it so stop. So why not stop it? 

Oh come on... ruthless Ellis was guilty as sin 

It was a stupid mistake to hang Ruth Ellis. She should just have been locked up for a few years.

There's something gruesome and sadistic about executing a woman, and people understandably recoil from it in most cases (though I wouldn't have minded if Myra Hindley had been hanged). Mrs Ellis's 1955 execution greatly strengthened the campaign to abolish the death penalty, which was a mistake, as the gallows undoubtedly deterred armed crime. 

Now our courts are so hopeless and our juries so weak that we cannot safely bring it back. But the attempt, in the ITV drama A Cruel Love, to turn Mrs Ellis (played by Lucy Boynton) into some sort of feminist heroine is twaddle. Her lawyer is shown telling her that she is a sort of Germaine Greer before her time. 'You represent everything they fear,' he tells her, 'an ambitious woman who has no respect for class boundaries, no respect for sexual boundaries.' Oh come on.

Lucy Boyton and Laurie Davidson as Ruth Ellis and David Blakely in ITV's A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story

She was undoubtedly guilty of shooting her boyfriend not just once but four times. She callously injured a passer-by while she was trying to drill one more bullet into David Blakely, as he lay dying in the street.

The police went after her because she killed, ruthlessly, in a plainly pre-planned crime, not because she challenged the class system and the sexual boundaries of the time. The 1950s, for sure, were not a very pleasant era (though I'm often accused of claiming they were).

But those who lived then were less willing to listen to excuses for wicked actions, and I think they were wise. We have gone much too far in the other direction.

Last week I noted the first appearance of special wall-mounted boxes containing emergency equipment to deal with stabbings. The next day I saw this installation, left, on a railway station, where you can get kit to cope with a stabbing, or a heart attack, or perhaps both at once. I’m more and more sure that I’d prefer us to work harder on preventing both these things.

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