Thomson Reuters has reported the killing of 14 high school students by gunmen in Mexico on Sunday.

Reporter Julian Cardona described the scene at Ciudad Juarez as a massacre, saying: "Gunmen jumped out of sport utility vehicles and fired at the students... in a house in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas... Bodies lay on the street outside and pools of blood collected by nearby parked cars. Inside the house, the walls were stained with blood and marked with bullet holes"

Ciudad Juarez is one of the world's most dangerous cities. Attacks like this are not uncommon and often involve drug cartels.


Reports like this are shocking for everyone who reads them, but one has to wonder how different the resulting thoughts and feelings may be between people in Britain and those who live in Mexico or the US. 

Of course, the closer to the scene you reside, the more likely it is that you knew someone involved. Gun crime is more common on the American side of the Atlantic and the danger seems all the more real.

Thousands of miles of ocean must help the British people distance themselves from such events, the likes of which are virtually unheard of in the UK. But perhaps the otherworldliness of the situation makes it harder to comprehend and upsetting in a different way. 


But as illegal weapons and organised crime crop up more often in the British press, it begs the question: Are incidents like this as far away as we'd like to believe?