Summations Only

Sorry Crash, this kind of 'and anyway, your sister smells' playground, deranged ranting is beneath argument - I'm not touching it. (At this point, the child may claim a win if he likes.) Well it's jolly useful on the battlefield - is that what you are expecting your schools to become? (If so, I think your kids will be needing full body armour, I don't think you can rely on your armed lunatic only shooting your kids in the back.)

Sure is.Perhaps you've forgotten for a moment that Israel is at war with enemies literally a stones throw away from them, that they are being attacked by rockets and bombs most days of the week and until a few weeks ago were on the brink of invading them?Is this the vision of America you have?

Just as an aside, I wasn't aware of this: Firearms regulation in Switzerland - WikipediaIt strikes me that this is more in line with what the originators of the US constitution had in mind.

To your eyes it looks safe and normal to have a kindergarden class teacher with a rifle strung across her shoulder as an everyday, natural thing? You know, like it's a story book she's carrying.Are you actually insane? Or just a troll? This has to be a Poe, no-one is this mad.

I don't know what you can do to stop your massacres now. Your country has been in denial about gun control and natural justice in society for so long that it now has the psychological and logistical means to carry them out indefinitely. And we both know that they will continue to happen.One thing I do know though, is that more guns will make things worse and until you get some sort of sanity into your gun control policies you'll make no progress at all.Armed teachers and Kevlared children won't help you - the very best outcome would be that it sends the angry and insane to murder in shopping malls, football stadiums, train stations and playgrounds.You need to start treating causes, not dealing ineffectually with symptoms.

Now wouldn't it be funny if that outlier had to be on the graph because it was actually the USA?Oops.

Well there's a thing....just lucky I guess.

Perhaps the graph simply points out the blindingly obvious fact that the USA actually IS an outlier - ie far outside what we'd normally expect in a modern Western democracy.

The original data and graphs plus comments and other reactions to it are here:http://mark.reid.name/iem/gun-deaths-vs-gun-ownership.html

This is selective memory - several people have pointed out that it's not a case of either or - just as it's not a case of doing nothing because the something that can be done in not a perfect answer.There are many things that can be done to reduce gun crime and crime generally, many of them involve tackling social inequalities - poverty, education, health care, housing - and one major issue is drug abuse.Legalising the use of drugs is, in my opinion, a good way to start actually controlling them, but the same people who are vehemently against gun control are just as vehemently against any liberalisation of drugs too.So politicians will continue with their art of the possible and do what they can, not what they should.

That's correct and we have said many times that crime - that's pretty much all crime - has a root cause in the inequality of society, poverty, education, houseing etc. but we want to treat both the sympton AND the cause because they are related. It has also been pointed out that several of us, far from having irrational fear of guns, actually have used guns and enjoy them. But we also recognise that they are extremely dangerous and must thereefore be controlled. Not banned; controlled. It would help, if you read and understood our position, rather than misrepresent it in this way.

The topic is gun control set in the context of the school murders - if you don't want to discuss gun deaths, why are you here?

I can remember or last UK school massacre which was Dunblane in 1996.The whole country was appalled by it and the response was almost unanimous "we want the guns out of our country." There were complaints and argument from gun clubs and a few individuals, but no-one - and I do mean no-one - thought the answer was to liberalise gun ownership.The whole country wanted to do whatever it took to prevent another Dunblane. Of course most people knew that it would be impossible to prevent a deranged person getting hold of a weapon and trying, but they wanted to know that they'd done what was possible to reduce that risk.The US situation is quite different, it seems that about half the population has the same feelings as the UK did but the other half desperately want to keep etheir guns and I'm really struggling to understand why.It seems like quite a tussle is going on in the US between left wing and right wing politics that underlies all this. The left wing seem to have rather 'Old' European liberal, pluralist views whilst the republicans appear to me to want to be back in the 18th century frontier country, with extreme religous beliefs, hang 'em high' justice, fear of government, unregulated capitalism and total liberty of the individual to do pretty much as he likes on his land.The gun control issue is then not about creating a safer society but about left and right wing politics - an erosion of individual rights. If things have got so politicised that rational decisions can't be made because of the main political game, it's not going to get done anytime soon.

Yes, I can almost see that. But.The car ban would get the entire population mad because it would affect literally everyone and be totally disproportionate.The gun control thing splits the population seemingly on party political lines. It's the dog whistle - 'out of my cold, dead hands,' right wing stuff. Why is it such a Republical thing?

The video shows why you're wrong. Have a look at it when you get home.