Wow Hasbeen. Armed citizens fighting bravely against the invading barbarians. Just like in RED DAWN! You've certainly done your research. That movie just dripped with believability didn't it?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087985/
For your information the militia that fought on the Kokoda Track were all conscripted into the army. They didn't operate independently of government. You've been watching too many movies about the American revolution.
This conspiracy theory about the government "taking our guns away" so they can institute a totalitarian regime is just paranoid hysteria.
Go and do some more research. Maybe RAMBO this time.

Thanks for the history lesson Shally. Incidentally have you ever read any? It might give you an idea about what governments can do, & have done, all too often. Like our Julia trying to have free speech abolished, to help her hide her past.

The fact about Militia is that they are hastily thrown together, & you really need people who can all ready shoot, & actually hit something, like a barn, from the outside.

My son who is giving initial introductory training to officer cadets tells me that most of these intakes have no idea of how a gun works, & even after a few trips to the range, still jump when the thing goes bang.

I see from your post you're pretty big on movies. I haven't bothered watching one since Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, so have to base my ideas on fact, not fiction.

Dear oh dear Hasbeen. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not trying to get ya eh?

Much to my chagrin, I agreed with Howard at the time over gun control, I didn't want other people to have guns, I don't really know why upon reflection. I now regret that agreement and can offer youthful ignorance as my own excuse.

I can only hope America doesn't go down the same path in perusing gun control as the perceived panacea for poor mental health policy and funding.

Low hanging fruit indeed.

Brendan O'Niell, a claimed Marxist, has written an interesting critique,
http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13179/

Here is a small section,

"No one knows what was going on in the mind of the Connecticut shooter. But what was striking about his shooting spree, like that which occurred in Columbine High School in 1999 or at the West Nickel Mines Amish School in 2006, was the utter lack of restraint, the absence of any moral code saying ‘It is wrong to violate a school’ or simply ‘It is wrong to shoot a six-year-old child in the head’. Such a dearth of restraining morality is something new, springing more from today’s culture of estrangement, and the individual nihilism it can nurture, than from the 200-year-old Second Amendment.

School shootings are better understood, not as the end product of American revolutionaries’ insistence on the populace’s right to bear arms, but as part of today’s trend for highly anti-social, super-individuated acts of nihilistic, narcissistic violence - from so-called ‘Islamist attacks’ carried out by British men on the London Tube to Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre of 77 of his fellow Norwegians last year. What such assaults share in common is a profound sense of cultural disconnection. They are, in many ways, the most extreme expression of the narcissism of our age, in which there is the constant promotion of self-obsession over socialisation, and individual identity over collective citizenship, giving rise to a sometimes volatile atmosphere - through both removing individuals from any sense of a meaningful social fabric and imbuing them with a powerful sense of entitlement, where one’s self-esteem counts for everything, and thus any undermining of it is a slight of the most dire order.

To try to explain mass school shootings through the fact that guns exist is like trying to explain the al-Qaeda phenomenon through the fact that aeroplanes exist: it fetishises the technical means as a way of avoiding grappling with cultural factors."

Very cogent, "onthebeach". I fear many of the ills pervading our society, and the global society at large, stem from a breakdown or 'mutation' of genuine morality, with an attendant estrangement of the individual from any abiding sense of responsibility to 'community', or to the good of the 'whole'. From various roots there is a rising narcissistic overemphasis on the rights of the individual - often at the expense of victims of abuse, exploitation or debasement (mental or physical). The focus of moral responsibility is 'skewed'. (Viz US debate on a DNA registry. Whose risk is paramount? Victim or potential perpetrator?)

On the world scale it is understandable that a great deal of confusion should exist as to where individual responsibility and commitment should lie - given the wide range of disparate (and often incompatible) cultural, belief and superstition (or mythology) systems prevailing. (Viz the murder of aid workers dispensing polio vaccine - by vested-interest fundamentalist groups purveying misinformation as to the 'real' purpose of the vaccination program - as supposedly to sap manhood or female fertility, or similar tripe.) There is no doubt however that in our own backyard we can and should do better, and the example pushed in our TV programs, movies, computer games and internet accessed material is relevant to the conduct and attitudes we would prefer to see exhibited by our populace.

As for guns: Some have no place in the hands of the general public, and, as with the right to drive a motor vehicle, licensing must be mandatory, and mental fitness, as well as civil record, should require close scrutiny as a major determinant for approval. Also, a high level of security of arms in private ownership must be mandatory - as it is in Oz - to minimise potential for unauthorised access. (Failure in the latter regard must be considered contributory in the latest US disaster.)