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Clearly, we are courting tragedy by turning a blind eye to marketing gimmicks plainly intended to turn children into gun enthusiasts before they are even old enough to buy a firearm of their own.

We're seeing this disintegration of the family movie into these blockbuster things that kids should not be exposed to with explosions, carnage and violence.

It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.

The last day of shooting, there were tears. It was this family that's grown together over the years. Many of us have worked on it since the beginning, so there's a sadness when we all go our separate ways.

Since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School three years ago, we have lost over 90,000 Americans to gun violence. This is a manmade crisis that needs to be treated as the public health epidemic it has become.

I've seen my fair share of drama over the years of Children In Need. I had a close brush with mortality in 2009 when a chain collapsed from the studio rigging. I was in mid-spout to camera when I heard an enormous crash behind me - a ton of steel had come hurtling down and smashed to the ground a few feet away.

It's up to each person's parents whether they think it's too frightening or too violent, how much their kids can handle, what they want to teach them, what they want to show them.

Moments of crisis, like the shooting in Newtown, tend to produce brief spikes of popular interest in gun control. My research on media attention suggests these spikes are extremely short-lived, and that they may be decreasing in intensity.

How many more school shootings do we need before we start talking about this as a social problem, and not merely a random collection of isolated incidents?

Gun crime is a major cause of fear and distress throughout the UK. The problem is deeply entrenched in a wide range of social and cultural factors and therefore not an isolated issue.