thistle:
I’m British but it seems an odd question you ask.
Everybody in every country should be anti-gun. There is nothing positive about having a gun. Pretending they are needed for self protection is not a valid argument.
Self protection is just one of several uses (and, as presentd by other posters, it is a statistically valid reason when other variables are properly controlled for).
Regarding the debacle in Australia, where the incidence of violent crime made a dramatic increase immediately after the great gun confiscation. The reverberations of the initial release of the crime stats following the ban led to the Australian government withdrawing the statistics for that period then completely redefining their reporting system to make before and after comparison impossible. Even then, it was still clear that rates of violent crime increased dramatically, despite economic stability at the time of the gun confiscation. When other variables where controlled for, the reduction of citizen firearm posession was the only explanation available for the magnitude of the jump in crime there.
Also, unlike Europe, where major predators have been hunted to extinction, truly dangerous wildlife is still common enough in rural areas of the Americas and Africa to be a significant factor. Owners of livestock in the US have a very real need to be able to dispatch such predators quickly. I myself have shot a coyote from the window of my master bath when a pack was making a morning raid on my chickens, and though I’ve ogt a 10 acre plot (mostly trees)I’m not a rancher or farmer by trade. Predators are a real and common threat even in suburban areas here.
thistle:
In the UK nobody is allowed guns yet gun related murders and crimes are less in our entire country than a major city in the USA.
False comparison. If nobody is allowed to have guns in an area (and there is not a recent history of widespread gun availability), of
course the “gun-related” crimes are going to be lower. Just like fewer kids will drown in swimming pools in areas with fewer swimming pools availble.
An apples to apples comparison is looking at whether the
total per-capita murder and crime rate is lower when comparing major cities in Britan to similar cities in the US (by socioeconomic standards). Looking at it that way, wider legal availablity of firearms
dramatically decreases the rate of violent crime
in general for areas with similar socioeconomic status.
thistle:
Yes I’m serious.
I don’t mean a butcher killing a cow, pig or chicken for food. My reply was to the poster who said guns can be used for hunting.
Are you saying its okay to kill animals for sport?
Yet another tired bit of anti-gun propaganda. You’ve just make a blanket judgement that hunters gererally do not hunt with gaining food as a siginicant part of their hunting goal. Again, I think you are taking the British experience where fox hunts (which are strictly for sport) are the normative style of hunting everywhere, when really, it is the British style of hunting that was out of touch with worldwide practice.
thistle:
Gun safety courses!!! Give me a break. The only SAFE course is to ban guns completely!!
Again, real-life data collection shows that increasing gun training for children reduces the rate of child gun accidents in areas with similar gun ownership populations, and that the benefit accelerated the more widespread the training is (as it increases the chance that at least one child invovled in finding an improperly stored firearm will know how to handle it safely and will insistthat unsafe handling be avoided).
For the record, a mop-bucket is more likely to cause the death of a member of a house owning a mop-bucket than a firearm is to cause the death of member of a house owning a firearm. Why is there such a focus on guns (which already have significant controls on ownership) when the most dangerous household object around can be bought at the dollar store by the dozen without even getting one’s ID checked?
We do re-enactments and I traded the WWII German reenactors a few shots with my Matchlock for a turn on their MG, which I gave to my son 
