Imo
Ya'll are turning this into an pro/anti gun platform.
That's seriously sad at this moment...
A bad experience from the aftermath of a mass shooting in Britain in 1996
A lot of people kept a respectful silence, and the British media was absolutely full of gun banners gleefully dancing in blood
As a result, their accusations, many of which "proved too much" and could have equally fallaciously been used to argue for a ban on being Scottish...
- went un challenged, and hence were accepted as true by a largely uninformed public, who were justifiably distressed by the killings of very young children.
Apart from the massive waste of tax payers money, to "buy" licensed guns, and to destroy them, in some cases they were very valuable antiques(I've chopped a link - as it relates to a named family)
there was also the wholly vindictive move to not compensate businesses for "safety legislation"
that bankrupted the guy who's indoor range I used (Via Gellia Mills, near Cromford in Derbyshire), and he took his own life as a result of the financial position which he was put in.
At present, it looks like the EU is going to ban legal ownership of semi auto .22rf rifles, as a result of the Paris attacks, where illegally held AKs which are far, far bigger than .22rf, were used.
this is despite the complete failure - of any controls and of widespread bans of centrefire semi auto, and complete, long standing bans on selective fire rifles in Europe -to prevent the Paris perps obtaining such guns.
Keeping silent in the face of variously un-informed and frequently delusional calls for gun control doesn't work, I have repeatedly bitter experience of that, and so I no longer keep silent/ my typing fingers still.
I used the word delusional - for several reasons:
the empirical evidence in Britain, is that the people who have undertaken mass shootings in Britain have all held current firearms certificates, that is despite the available estimates showing several times more firearms being held illicitly and hence by un vetted people.
Neither guns nor killings will go away as a result of laws.
There are other readily available ways of causing large scale loss of life, which I will
not get drawn into discussing.
