Honestly, I believe that this has a lot to do with business. I’m quite sure the gun manufacturers have their links into government and that they’d lobby hard to prevent any legislation that prevents the sales of firearms to anyone but the military (which, frankly, is the only appropriate place for them). In the meantime, the guns keep getting sold and people keep getting killed by them. Unless you have a real need for one (game keeper, for example) then they shouldn’t be sold to you. Dealing with the problem may well be difficult but nothing is going to change unless the supply is stopped (black market arms, however, will be difficult to stop). I simply can’t believe that no one is prepared to do anything about it.

i don’t know how things came to be the way that they are, but the problem NOW is that there’s just too many guns to get rid of them. because so many criminals have guns, people feel they need a gun to feel safe. if there was a ban or an amnesty, you can be pretty sure that most of the criminals wouldn’t give up their fire arms.

the gun thing makes me uncomfortable… and i’ll never own one… but i don’t see trying to ban guns as any sort of a solution right now. as head said, you have to get to the core of the issue, the social factors leading to people wanting to hurt each other.

it was much easier to ban guns in England because the laws were tight anyway, and there were a lot less weapons, but now England has a knife problem.

sure, a knife problem is a lot better than a gun problem, but socially speaking nothing has changed.

it’s become almost a cliche to say this, but Canada has the same violent video games, and same high levels of gun ownership as America does, and yet it has almost one quarter the murders per capita. trying to pin the blame on things such as video games and guns doesn’t work.

I can see the argument for knives, hammers and the like since they have a practical use in society, with the exception of combat knives. But what do you need a gun for? A gun surely has only one purpose and can never be considered to be “a good thing”. Sure, I can take a chef’s knife and stab someone with it, but I also need it to cut meat and chop vegetables. This idea that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is just completely barking. Get rid of them, they only hurt.

“For anybody struggling to keep up, this means he shot his girlfriend.”

The BBC is officially the greatest media outlet ever.

Anyway, I see what you are saying about the knife problem. However, as in the case of the young man from Zaire who was fatally knifed, the street gang also assaulted him with bats, hockey sticks, and at least one hammer.

Banning commonly used weapons just means one of two things: law abiding people are the ones who won’t have them or new, less conventional, weapons will be used instead.

Trying to bring these comments back on topic and more into general agreement here: Obviously banning guns, knives or even videogames will not stop the root cause of violence. Though I’m sure I may be preaching to the choir here, our efforts would be better spent trying to tackle the causes of violence in people and not the methods they use to express that violence.

I’ve always said that if every person in a room was armed with a gun/knife/bat/whatever and no one had a reason to use them, no one would get hurt.

Senator Clinton wants the government to fund a study to determine if videogames cause violence. That’s non-sense even statistically speaking. What she ought to be sponsering is a study into teenage violence in general and analyze the myriad factors that influence or encourage such violence.

Anyway, like I said, I agree with you on this topic whole-heartedly, I’m just a bit over-sensitive to the gun issue.