Actually the ghettos are awash with guns and kids can get them. Look on-line at any of the British media for the week before last.
Simon

To state that the 2nd Amendment is cause of 20K to 30K deaths per year is a very ignorant statement. The RKBA is not an enabler of gun-related violance. Criminal behavior is the enabler!
Much of the figures you cite are gang-on-gang violence fueled by the illegal drug trade, which itself is fully banned, BTW, with no noticable affect except making lots of money for some and death for others.
You seem well spoken and educated, but I do detect some snobbery as you describe the culture here in the colonies. I'm surprised that you seem not to be aware that during the darkest hour for GB during WWII it was American citizens who sent over thousands of personally owned and donated firearms for the defense of your homeland against the Germans. Why did Americans have to do that? Evidently because self-defense was not a priority to the citizens of GB, then as now.
Next time, (and it WILL be a "next time" considering your muslim invasion) I hope we will be in a position to respond to your needs again.

If there was historically no 2nd Amendment there would be no RKBA and therefore there would be no guns and therefore there would be no gun-related violence in the United States.

Isn’t criminal behaviour, human behaviour that is against the law? As criminals are not allowed to purchase or own guns, criminals should in theory not have access to any guns which allows them to commit murder. When they commit criminal acts such as murder through gun related use, where do they get their guns from? Is it that they were originally law abiding citizens who had owned guns who then became criminals who then go on to murder their victim with the gun? Do law abiding citizens give guns to criminals? If so, does that not make them criminals? Why do criminals use guns anyway? Is it because law abiding citizens have guns because they have the right as law abiding citizens to lawfully keep and bear arms under the 2nd Amendment or is it due to the need to own a gun because criminals have guns. Are law abiding citizens allowed to kill criminals with their guns allowed to remain as law abiding citizens or do they become criminals themselves? This must depend on whether the act of killing with the gun was legal or illegal under the law I suppose. Do criminals who have guns who kill law abiding citizens under the same circumstances still remain criminals? As they are criminals who are not allowed to have a legally owned gun but have killed someone legally under the law, as in, say trespass on private property in Texas after nightfall, are they regarded as law abiding citizens or as criminals? What happen to law enforcement officers who kills a legally armed law abiding citizen with their legally held gun? Do they then become criminals? What happens if they kill an illegally armed criminal in the same way? Do they then become a criminal or a hero?

The 2nd Amendment – the criminal justice industries friend. If there were no guns in America and there were no criminals and no fear of criminals exactly how many would this put out of work?

I agree with you that criminals (human beings who have a history of law breaking) who have access to guns are ultimately responsible for the majority of deaths caused by gun shot wounding (if they killed someone unlawfully by definition they are now a criminal), but there is also a measurable percentage of the total figure that also die from gun shot wounding accidents. Many contributors on the forum are undoubtedly responsible gun owners who know exactly what their firearms are capable of and they have ensured that their family members are also aware that a gun is not something to be played about with. But there are literally thousands of other US citizens who have died or have been seriously wounded every year because they lack safety training in the use of firearms.

The 2nd Amendment was fundamental to the beginnings of the revolutionary politics, which formed the United States of America, the right to keep and bear arms. It was a way to ensure an armed militia. A civilian territorial army in essence was created to protect the United States of America from enemies foreign and domestic. It was also a way to ensure the United States of America remained a constitutional democratic republic. RKBA was designed to ensure itself as the final arbitrator if the finely balanced constitutional arrangements went out of kilter. It was there to ensure that dictatorship, which would then transcend into monarchy, would never take hold. But it also has a downside. If ever that final arbitration is required, when the balance of power of the internal constitutional politics within the United States tips either one way or the other then a blood bath will quickly follow. It has happened once before and for the sake of the US and the World I hope it doesn't happen again. Of course now, the United States of America does not need an armed militia to protect itself from enemies foreign, it has its professional armed services.

Yes this is very true. Field sports such as hunting are basically a rich man's sport. The main reason for this is historical. In the UK, large areas of land were purchased by very wealthy 18th and 19th century industrialists who turned them into what are called sporting estates. These estates were then used as exclusive playgrounds for the very wealthy up until the middle of the 20th century when they then began to become economically unworkable. The estates since have had to diversify into tourism but there are still a small number of estates which provide hunting for game.

Are you accusing American manufacturers and importers of legal, safety test, heavily regulated, unintelligent machines of being accessories to felonious acts? I want you to answer that question, and there are only two answers- "yes" or "no".

Are you accusing, OR believe, me and the other members of this forum of being accessories, accomplices or conspirators to felonious acts for owning samples of the most heavily taxed and regulated category of manufactured non-chemical, non-pharmaceutical item sold in America? I want you to answer that question, and there are only two answers- "yes" or "no".

I would have to say morally 'Yes'. The armaments industry markets and sells products which have only one design purpose, that is to kill. Concealed hand guns have generally only one design purpose, that is to kill other people. The industry knows full well the death toll statistics. The industry does not care about the death toll, it is only interested in its own financial profitable gain. This is why there are specific laws in many States which specifically do not allow any civil actions against the industries which provide firearms to the public knowing what they know. The vested interest is that great.



'No', but that is a loaded question. I am not going to accuse any individual on this forum that they are involved in any illegal activities in relation to firearms selling, procurement or ownership. The previous posting points I have raised are purely based on my moral viewpoint and if most Americans wish to believe in a simplistic good guys versus bad guys moralistic viewpoint in relation to gun ownership then that is up to them.

Well, so far as I know, nowhere in the US grows a marketable supply of coca, and yet we can't seem to stop the flow of cocaine (or many other drugs that don't orignate in the US) despite harsh drug laws and a fairly sizable law enforcement/interdiction campaign for a few decades now. There are an awful lot of guns manufactured outside the US, many of them quite affordable. I doubt that the absence of the 2nd Amendment would ever have significantly reduced the number of firearms in this country being used by criminals. At one point I believe even England got into the game of illegally transporting firearms to the US, back around the time of our civil war I think it was.

So long as there is a demand, there will be a supply. The laws won't do much to change that, except to keep guns out of otherwise law-abiding citizens' hands.

If what you say about the lack of assault rifles in the UK is true, then I would be disappointed. In Australia, the illegal possession of assault rifles is almost as prevalent as for handguns. Based on my experience there, a lot of folks still have both. Most of them just got rid of their old POS worn out 303s and shotguns and such.

The laws don't seem to have much effect on criminal behavior one way or the other. Even if availability were significantly reduced, the maniacs would just use something else, like at my daughter's school last week, where no guns were involved because apparently the kids couldn't get their hands on any in time, but were able to build a couple of bombs nonetheless, one of them so constructed it posed a serious threat. We have so many criminal laws on the books now even the lawyers are struggling to keep up, and yet our prisons continue to fill with people who know they are breaking the law and go ahead with their felonious activity anyways.

I will have to stand by my original tenet; the surest deterrent to criminal violence is effective use of lethal self defense. That seems most likely accomplished this day and age via the proficient and determined use of a firearm.

BTW, this is my first ever post from Singapore, on my way home.

Actually those laws protect all importers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers of legal products who sell their non-defective wares in a legal manner to those persons whom they believe to be able to legally purchase said items based upon the documents they are provided with (and in the case of automobiles, firearms, some medication, and most industrial and agricultural chemicals, having consulted with state and federal authorities and logged the sale as the law requires) at time of sale, those documents passing inspection. In other words, they protect the law abiding from the whiny people whom they do not wrong.

If you stab yourself in the leg with a knife, it isn't the sellers fault, now is it?

If you fall off a ladder, unless it is defective, is it your fault?

If try to eat a beer can rather than drink it's contents, you are stupid git and that's the long and the short of it.

If you use a car as a get away vehicle after holding up a liquor store with a knife, the car nor it's seller committed what crime, right?

A seller of pressurized gases who has his stock stolen is in no way responsible if someone ODs on nitrous or makes a series of bottle bombs out of acetylene.

Is the guy who sold the pedophile the hard drive guilty of collection kiddie porn, or is the freak?

If someone buys a lighter, how can they be held accountable if it is used to light the fire that burns down a building?

If you buy sleeping pills and try to overdose on them, is the chemist to blame in your little utopia? I should certainly hope not, or there won't be a single business in the UK in a few years.

But you'll differentiate between these machines and chemical processes which have myriad of legal and legitimate purposes and a legally owned firearm in the hands of a law abiding, mentally competent citizen. That you can manufacture such a fiction, to blame a few pounds of metal, wood and plastic for a crime, amazes me. It has no life, it has no soul, and it can't hurt you in anyway unless another human uses or abuses it. Your solution is to take away the tools; our solution is take away the people who misuse them.

And you accuse us of having a simplistic mindset.

And I'm not even going to bother with your second point other than to say it wasn't a loaded question. I honestly want to know what you think of the American gun owner. As for your moral perspective, I respect it; I think it is based on denial, but I respect your right to have it. But you keep attacking our moral perspective and insulting us.

If the perpetrator is high on drugs the only way to stop the threat without getting within arm's reach is a firearm. He won't even feel anything else unless you do similar damage.



A person minding his own business walking down a city street after dinner would be which one? This would seem to be a rather black & white difference. How do you consider this to be simplistic or moralistic?

<< there would be no RKBA and therefore there would be no guns >>>

As someone else has commented: you are obviously an educated man with a viewpoint worth listening to, but (and no offence is intended) that is an incredible statement.

there WOULD be guns. Britain has never had a second amendment and manufactures no guns; but it's shootings are rising. The argument against gun bans is very simple; 'they don't work'.

On a campus of 24,000 students do you really think there were no drugs? no illegal immigrants? no banned books or films? So what is this magical property of guns that they alone can be stopped at the border?
If that troubled boy had been in Britain he'd have simply used an illegal gun.
Simon