>The stuff about gun violence would make me laugh if I could free
>myself of the association of dead children my grandkids age. But
>really you can ban anything thing you want and still just buy it off
>the web and get it delivered. If you check around you'll see they
>are running specials of giant magazines, high powered ammo, and
>other threatened items... And then too were is the heartfelt
>sympathy for the thousands of Iraqi and Afghan dead children. I
>guess the White House doesn't watch AJE.
>
>It wouldn't have stopped Adam Lanza. All the guns were in his
>completely sane and apparently normal mother's name who just happen
>to need a Bushmaster, Glock, body armor, and no doubt a few hundred
>rounds of high velocity hollow point ammo. She was in training for
>the Special Forces Lady's Auxiliary?
Here in Australia You have to demonstrate a reason for needing for the type of firearm you want a licence for. There are various categories of firearm licence and a range of acceptable reasons for having them.
The main thing that Americans would have trouble with is that self-defense is categorically not an acceptable reason for being given a firearm licence. The closest is a licence granted for the reason that you are employed as a security officer of the kind that needs to carry a firearm.
I'm pretty sure that the teachers volunteering to be armed to protect their student would not even be eligible for a firearm licence in this country. At least not for that reason. Teachers not being considered professional security officers.
Self-loading (semi-automatic) long barrel firearms are in a special category of firearm that the ordinary sporting shooter is not permitted to own. You need a special reason and a special licence, even to own and use a semi-auto rimfire rifle, or shotgun. (Pump-action shotguns are in the same class, though curiously a pump-action rifle is not. (I own a pump-action .22 rifle, but would not be able to get a licence for a pump-action shotgun, because it is a banned weapon for sporting shooters.)
So you can guess that the firearms laws were written by a bunch of super-anal suburban middle-class drongos, based on their prejudices more than any realistic understanding of firearms. But they got a few things right, like banning military-style weapons. (Even if even the semi-auto .22 got caught up in the hysteria.)
When they banned these weapons, they spent billions buying them back from the people who owned them before the ban. They were dead serious with their mission to get rid of these weapons.
I do think that the ban on owning a firearm for reasons of self-defense is probably something else the middle-class pratts got right too. You can't tolerate that kind of wild-west behaviour in a civilised society.
Bill Bartlett bracknell Tas