Thanks Flipper that is exactly what I've been getting it. Gun themselves aren't evil and not everyone that owns one is some sort of John Rambo nutter, the vast majority are decent people. The problem is when one of the nutters out there or one of the criminals or angry people with something to prove gets a hold of one, it gets ugly. Canadians are very protective of your country, and a lot of us own guns, my Grandpa has had a shotgun for years and I know several of my peers and their parents keep arms in house as well. This is not a issue of the will to protect yourself as I think you would find that quite evident in Canada, its a matter of responsibility. Take a shotgun, excellent home defence weapon, dependable, easy to maintain, a large spread pattern makes targeting in close quarters easy and shot does not penetrate through walls easily limiting risk. Now while a full auto M4 is cool it requires diligent cleaning to insure it is there when you need it, firing in full auto in the middle of the night is difficult and unless your a very disciplined individual (read: military trained) and burst fire even when panicked, your not likely to hit anything if your first or second shot misses. The added danger is that rifle munitions in say 5.56 or 7.62 can easily penetrate several walls and all those misses have to go somewhere so it puts your whole neighbourhood in danger, so its not a good home defence weapon. It would be overkill to use a automatic for hunting and while I wholeheartedly support accurate target shooting as a sport, fully auto weapons usually just get shown off by spraying down a clip at some cutouts or watermelons (not saying that’s not fun, just not much of a sport). About clip size, there are arguments both ways, 10 bullets as opposed to 15 are still very lethal from a crime point of view, but from a defence point if you need more than 10, you lost already.

In a risk to reward look at things, you stand to put people in a lot of danger proliferating assault weapons while not getting a lot of security in return. Do I want to ban guns? Hell no. Do I think responsibility should come before fun? Yeah.