>
>I am genuinely curious and trying to sort my thoughts out on the matter. I
>have owned guns since I was a child (I bought my first gun, a semiautomatic
>.22, when I was 13) and I use them a lot (exclusively for hunting, to be
>clear), but I guess I am not seeing how this makes me more likely to go on
>a shooting spree than anybody else on the lbo list. Granted, this is a
>dreaded anecdote, but I am struggling to understand how a gun, through any
>inherent quality it possesses, makes me characteristically more likely to
>kill somebody than I would be if I did not have a gun*;
They aren't saying it makes you more likely to kill, just better equipped for the job.
Your .22 calibre rabbit rifle probably shouldn't alarm anyone though. I think the current argument is that it might be helpful to ban the high-powered military assault weapons, since they have no legitmate use aside from killing people. Whichcivilians aren't encouraged to do. Just as civilians are not permitted to own personal nuclear weapons, other weapons of mass destruction should also be kept out of the hands of people with no legitimate use for them.
In my view handguns are also something that probably should be more severely restricted. For some reason that didn't really happen in Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre, your semi-automatic .22 was banned, along with the military assault rifles that were owned by immature wankers. Even pump-action shotguns were banned, which many wallaby hunters were really annoyed by. But the handgun crowd escaped virtually unscathed. Admittedly they were already licenced and regulated, but a semi-automatic handgun seems harder to justify than a pump-action shotgun in terms of legitimate "need".
The real problem there I think was that John Howard was a suburban solicitor, with the usual suburban disdain for the rural people affected.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
Anyhow, a word to the wise. No need to stock up on ammunition etc in anticipation of the gun law reform to come from Preisdent Obama. Reform, when it comes will be effected by a conservative administration, not the nominal liberal side of politics. Its always your friends that are best placed to sell you out. ;-)