Kalashnikov, grenade and suicide attacks across French capital.

I was at the Guardian Centre in Colliers Wood last night, at a quiz to raise money for MertonVision, who, this year, celebrate 50 years of providing services, information and support to residents of the borough with a visual impairment.

Just as I was starting to think what a comfortably heart-warming evening it was social media reports started coming in via peoples' mobile phones of the atrocities in Paris.

Paris terror attacks: Isil terrorists gunned down disabled people as woman held dying Briton in her arms

Us and them. How can we be the same species as the people who did this? Words fail me.

The last book I read was The Gun: The Story of the AK-47. I have been thinking about it a lot today.

The AK-47, or 'Kalashnikov', is the most abundant and efficient firearm on earth. It is so light it can be used by children. It has transformed the way we fight wars, and its story is the chilling story of modern warfare.

C. J. Chivers's extraordinary new book tells an alternative history of the world as seen through these terrible weapons. He traces them back to their origins in the early experiments of Gatling and Maxim, and examines the first appearance of the machine-gun. The quest for ever greater firepower and mobility culminated in the AK-47 at the beginning of the Cold War, a weapon so remarkable that, over sixty years after its invention and having broken free of all state control, it has become central to civil wars all over the world.

The Kalashnikov is the main tool that was used in yesterday's massacres. It is estimated that 100 million Kalashnikov-family weapons have been built of which 75 million are AK-47s,

That genie is not going to be stuffed back into the bottle God help us.