NOT far from our Walmgate offices, on the corner with St Denys Road, is the unofficial fly-poster capital of York. This colourful collection of adverts certainly livens up what would otherwise be just another dilapidated shop, and acts as an unofficial noticeboard of the latest music releases.

If it were installed in the Tate Modern, the building would probably be worth more than the rateable value of Coney Street.

This week, a poster for Armand Van Helden's latest album caught my eye. Our fiercely well-informed arts writer tells me that Armand is big on the dance scene.

But it wasn't his music I was interested in, rather the photograph promoting it. It shows a young African boy pointing a rifle at an unseen enemy.

Sadly this is an image with which we are all too familiar. It left me merely feeling grateful that in Britain you could never come across a similar sight.

Then what should leap out at me from Monday's Evening Press but a photograph of an 11-year-old child with his finger on the trigger of a shotgun. He was being instructed on how to use it while another child, aged only eight, looked on.

This is a far more shocking image than that on Armand's poster. What on earth is anybody doing handing a firearm to a child?

The organisers of the "Young Shots" activity day at Castle Howard, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, were apparently teaching children as young as ten "the safe and responsible way to use shotguns and rifles".

The only safe and responsible thing to do with children and firearms is to keep them well apart.

It would be interesting to hear the logic that the BASC employed to justify its action. "Well, kids are forbidden from having sex, drinking alcohol and voting until their late teens, so we thought, heck, let's give 'em a deadly weapon to play with to stave off the boredom."

Sometimes it seems we have learned nothing from gun massacres here and in the United States. Not only should guns be kept away from all children, they should be kept away from all adults save those with a cast-iron reason for owning one.

We need only look across the Atlantic to know what hell awaits a society without tough gun laws.

Only a few days ago we were subjected to the grotesque spectacle of macho-man Charlton Heston finding it necessary to clutch a rifle to defend himself from... American mothers.

A week after the "Million Moms" marched on Washington to make a forlorn call for stricter gun control, Mr Heston waved his big weapon in the air to cheers from the National Rifle Association, of which he is president. He told delegates that his gun would only be wrested from his "cold, dead hands".

As an American, Mr Heston has more chance than most to see his rhetoric become reality. A sobering 14 US citizens per 100,000 die a gun-related death, which adds up to about 37,800 a year. Twelve children a day are killed by guns, despite the NRA's "gun education programme" that reached 13 million school students last year.

The reason for so many gun deaths is obvious: so many guns. About 192 million privately-owned firearms were in US hands at the last count.

In England, where few people have ever held a gun, the death rate from them is only 0.41 per 100,000; even in Northern Ireland the rate is 6.6.

MPs on the Home Affairs Committee recently recommended that no one under 14 be allowed to handle a gun. Up that age limit to 18 and they'd be getting it about right.

Only when guns are no longer an acceptable part of a child's "activity day" will we have got the law we need.