Connecticut School Shooting: What The World's Newspapers Are Saying

Every time America goes through the horror of another school shooting, the world's media goes into the reflexive mood of this kind of coverage by non-American journalists: Why do these things happen so often in the U.S.?

The papers are typically filled with ponderous analyses by Washington and New York correspondents, who atttibute the frequency of those horrifying shootings to a uniquely American mind-set, which they explain with a variety of reasons.

The U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, guaranteeing Americans the right to bear arms, always gets a mention, as does the fact that no other constitution in the Western world makes a similar mention.

The existence of the powerful National Rifle Association also tends to baffle the journalists who look at America from abroad, typically from countries where gun-owner lobbies, to the extent that they exist at all, wield a fraction of the NRA's legislative power.

But that's for the next day's paper. On Friday, as the extent of the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown became clear, the world's newspapers focused on the human aspects of the Connecticut atrocity -- the depth of the horror, the shocking weight of the number of those killed -- and on the stopping power of the images of children with horror on their faces.