EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

The Olympics: good sports

As long as it goes more or less to plan, then the Olympics will at last be not about the business of sport but sport itself

The Olympic torch has reached London. Its wet, winding journey through the British isles (with a detour to Dublin) is a neat metaphor for the Games themselves: a great deal of heavy-handed organisation, corralling of crowds and cranking up of national pride, followed by a large, loud appearance from the sponsors – Coca-Cola's scarlet pantechnicon of free drink and dancing girls – and finally the unexpectedly moving appearance of an ordinary person, often chosen by friends and neighbours for service to the community, bearing the torch itself. Next Friday, the athletes, the people who really matter, at last take over from the organisers and the arguments, the blunders and the oversights. As long as it goes more or less to the plans seven hard years in the making, then until the Paralympics' closing ceremony on 9 September, it will at last be not about the business of sport but sport itself.

Winning an Olympic bid is about as far from the Olympic ideal as the Games themselves can sometimes seem. There was scant evidence of global good humour when London ambushed the favourites Paris in Singapore in 2005. But some ideals survive even the most destructive of launches. Labour, helped by Seb Coe, the indomitable athlete turned Tory politician and now Olympics chief, won the Games for London with a message about legacy and participation. The Lea Valley – the Olympic zone that cuts across some of London's poorest boroughs – was finally to get a taste of boomtown Britain. First would come the Games, then housing, work and, of course, unrivalled facilities.

The news this week that the Olympic Park's media centre now looks certain to be taken over by iCity as a technology hub, with the promise of up to 5,000 jobs, is welcome evidence of the determination to fulfil the original promise, after rumours that it was to add to the generous provision of private (and some affordable) housing in the Olympic Park. Civic organisations and the local boroughs have fought to set ambitious targets for convergence, raising opportunities for Lea Valley residents to the level of those enjoyed by the rest of London. The lessons of other Olympic cities were studied: think Atlanta where a grim Games marred by a bombing in which one person died has left an admired community legacy, and not Athens, where almost the only useful remnant is a stretch of motorway.

But no one has yet pulled off regeneration on the scale being attempted here. It is not enough that the Games, as one assessment predicts, actually generate a return greater than the £9bn they are costing. The London Docklands tower over the planners as a warning of how good intentions go awry: a new overspill city from where the prosperous middle classes can travel elsewhere to work is not what they are after. It is harder to work out what the benchmarks by which the Lea Valley can be judged should be, but they will include employment, rising school standards and good, affordable housing. It might take a generation to achieve. By then local people should feel compensated for the missile launchers on their roofs and the lack of jobs on the construction sites.

Meanwhile, London's groaning transport system may not cope and, however much Lord Coe insists that the Zil lanes are there simply to allow athletes to plan their warm-up routine to the second, it seems more plausible that they are really about guaranteeing members of the International Olympic Committee a smooth commute from their central London hotels. There is much about hosting the Olympics that chafes, and big questions to ask about how the IOC works and whether an organisation invented by a 19th-century romantic can escape being traduced by the hard-faced businessmen of the 21st. But not right now. Now it is time to sit back and relish the heady, exhilarating, unforgettable mix of triumph and disaster that is the Olympic Games.

Guns in America: beyond control

America has had more than its share of deadly shootings, but there is scant hope of a change to gun laws

There is something in the old libertarian refrain – guns don't kill without people getting involved. The deadliest shootings of modern times have included such disparate corners of the Earth as Dunblane in Scotland, Utøya in Norway and Port Arthur, Tasmania – humanity's crooked timber will occasionally prove devastatingly warped in any setting. But even before Friday's cinema massacre in Denver, Columbine, Virginia Tech and Tucson had already given America more than its share of slots on this grisly list. Every murder requires its means as well as its perpetrator, and these are more reliably at hand in the US.

It is not a hard argument to make, and yet it is devilishly difficult to do anything about its conclusion in American politics. New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, immediately called on Barack Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, to respond to the massacre by detailing gun-control plans, but he shouldn't hold his breath. The National Rifle Association's lobbying, a Republican House, a Senate that filibusters as a matter of routine, and a conservative supreme court which recently committed itself to a particularly full-blooded interpretation of the second amendment's "right to bear arms" – any one of these would be a challenging obstacle to surmount, and every one of them stands in the way of using the law to restrict the flow of weapons.

Washington's paralysis problem is familiar in contexts from climate change to debt. With guns, however, the difficulty is not just checks, balances and partisanship, it is a great swath of voters. The one recent politician to have taken a small step towards control was Bill Clinton. He signed into law the Brady bill, which mandated background checks on gun purchasers, or at least it did until it was somewhat neutered in the courts. Even this modest move drained such energy that the president would later blame the Democrats' loss of Congress on the battle, claiming rifle toters "could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House speaker".

But in the 1990s, public opinion was in fact running roughly two-to-one in favour of gun control. More recently – and especially since the great recession took hold – the urge for arms to protect oneself in a rough old world appears to have spread. Before Friday's massacre, the polls were suggesting something close to an even split. While the right's wilder voices continue to claim that President Obama is secretly plotting to trash gun rights through UN treaties or some other back-channel means, his legislative agenda has in fact meticulously avoided the subject. The most fitting tribute to Colorado's innocent dead would be a change in this position. Sadly, there is scant hope of that.

Unthinkable? Saving our newsagents

Set aside the big chains such as WH Smith, and about 10 independent newsagents go out of business every week

How did you last buy a newspaper? Scanned through the self-checkout at the supermarket? Added to the £20 of unleaded from the local petrol station? Our own circulation research suggests that only about half of readers will have bought Saturday's Guardian from a newsagent (it's more Monday to Friday). Behind that stat lies a big change in the way we buy print; there are more outlets than ever before to get your ink-fix, but fewer newsagent's shops. Set aside the big chains such as WH Smith, and about 10 independent newsagents go out of business every week. This decline was in train well before the recession. Many of the same factors are at work here as account for why more than one in 10 town centre shops are empty. Still, there is something particularly disturbing about the loss of newsagents. You might expect a newspaper to say this: that Big Supermarket Express is never going to deliver papers, and often does not carry the same range of publications. But a local newsagent's also serves as a community hub: staff know their customers, and often live above the shop. The last decade has been a bad one for our high-street institutions: pubs, post offices and paper shops. These business failures leave their communities poorer, and policies are desperately needed to arrest the decline: whether that be lower rates for community enterprises or something more radical. Our newsagents are valuable – and not just for people who like newspapers. It's time we started treating them as such.