Re Old but deadly rifle.

Thanks everyone for your replies. I am aware that in the United States gun control laws vary from State to State and that under the US constitution there is the right to bear arms. What I was trying to determine was where the sensible limit to that right was.

In the UK there have been two notable tragedies which have led to a change in the law with regard to gun control. Firstly there was the Hungerford massacre (1987 16 killed), where a man armed with an automatic assault rifle went through a sleepy English village and began to randomly kill his relatives and neighbours. This led to the restriction i.e. ban on Automatic and Semi Automatic Rifles.
Then in the sleepy Scottish village of Dunblane in 1996, a man armed with hand guns killed 15 small children (about the same age as the children in aloha's pictures) and their teacher. This led to the restriction i.e. ban on hand guns. The common thread was that the individuals concerned in both tragedies were mentally disturbed. I do of course recognise that it is not the killing tool (Gun) itself that is responsible for such evil but the individual who uses that killing tool who is responsible for their actions. The problem is that individuals who are mentally disturbed, some are not responsible for their actions. I suppose the issue is that without access to such efficient killing tools then the individual is much more limited in what he or she can do i.e. the numbers of deaths will be a lot less.

I know that many will argue that if everyone had guns then the limits of both tragedies would have been more confined because the actions of the crazed gunman could have been stopped at an earlier stage. This might have been true for the Hungerford massacre but not the Dunblane massacre. You cannot legislate for the mentally disturbed but you legislate to ensure that they don't have access to such efficient means of killing. Please don't think that I am a gun control liberal (egg sucking liberal whose needs to be reprogrammed - Ponder - you have the greatest collection I've ever seen). I always found hitting the target at 1200 metres with the Lee Enfield quite challenging and rewarding. In America you live in a democratic republic, you as a nation have decided to ensure that you all have in principle the right to bear arms. In the UK, we live in a democratic constitutional monarchy. Democratic being the key word. Its just that the loss of the lives of innocent people and small children have tipped the balance of the argument against the personal ownership of such deadly weapons. Most people in the UK would agree that a small restriction on their freedom to own a concealed hand gun or assault rifle is something their are prepared to do to help ensure that future tragedies can be avoided. Of course the argument I have put forward can also be applied to other tools which can kill, Air Rifles, Swords, Knifes, Pointy Sticks etc, the politicians can take things to far. But at the end of the day the British people are inherently sensible and reasonable people and they do hold their freedoms within the law with high regard.

As for the Enfield rifle, I do actually regard it to be more deadly than even the fully automatic assault rifles (AR15s and M16 derivatives, licenses required I believe from previous responses on this thread) issued to the US army soldiers. This is because it is a much more capable weapon and when used in the right hands, therefore much more lethal.

Susan and billym - I know this going to make some mad but here goes - With regard to the swiss anti-aircraft gun point - I think I remember in 2003 Iraqi invasion that a local Iraqi farmer shot down a US Apache helicopter gun ship with a Lee Enfield .303 Mk4.