Gun laws are a dilemma for any government. Striking a balance between those whose use of a firearm is perfectly legitimate and restricting criminals is probably impossible.

I am British living in the UK and we have had our own problems such as Hungerford and Dunblane for which impact of the reactive legislation is difficult to measure in the sense of preventing further criminal acts. The legislation has certainly hit shooting clubs resulting in the British Olympic team training in other European countries with more relaxed gun laws. These countries have not experienced the same problems as the UK. If they do, it will be interesting to see how they react.

Despite the legislation gun crime in the UK continues and, although I do not have statistics, it is seldom that one of the national newspapers doesn’t carry a story about a gun crime.

I have never understood the purpose of a hand held pistol. The only reason I see for them is to shoot someone – they have no other purpose! The same goes for automatic weapons. Unless there is a legitimate use for guns they should be completely banned and steps taken to rid them of the criminal world. How this is carried out is the big question but a guns amnesty it a start. It will need someone with imagination to completely get rid of them.

DavidJS is the only one on this trail to venture into the ludicrous but no one will follow. This sort of extrapolation to the absurd extreme of privately owned nuclear weapons is really sloppy intellect.

And Wolfe, what a fatuous argument. When you have, in fact, rid the criminal world of their guns, then please, do come back for a chat about the need for guns. When you have had to confront 3 car loads of drunken hoons crossing your land to party in your irrigation dam, when the average police response time is two hours or more, you will realise that guns provide a number of very important non-lethal services.

1 They deter the unreasonable actions of those who would otherwise have zero respect for either your person or your property.
2 They balance the equation when a large number of people would otherwise be inclined to intimidate a few.
3 They provide a very reassuring last resort which allows the gun owner to assert their lawful rights without undue duress.
4 They widen the envelope within which the consequences of unreasonable or unlawful acts will be felt by the perpetrator.
5 They extend the reach of lawful enforcement by police in circumstances where the communities expectations of timely response are not, or cannot be delivered to the whole community.

And this last point is very significant. It is all very well for urbanites, who are never more than 10 minutes away from a police station, to say that there is no need for guns but it is nothing less than ignorance or hypocrisy if those same people are unwilling to fund the same level of police access to the rural community.

How unusual, a metropolitan double standard with lashings of self righteousness.

Love your image of the tightly-policed metropolis, Perseus:

>>It is all very well for urbanites, who are never more than 10 minutes away from a police station<<

Perse, that figure is supportable if you happen to be travelling towards the police station (and by definition away from whatever incident may have initiated the trip), but not when the required movement is FROM the police station, TO the incident.

As an inner-city dweller of twenty years, I can attest to the fact that you can wait indefinitely for such trivial occurrences as burglaries. A call at three in the morning might, on a good day, elicit a response the following morning, and that will most likely be a phone call to enquire whether anyone was injured... If you say no, I just wanted someone around to check for fingerprints, that sort of thing, there will be a suppressed chuckle at the other and of the phone, and a couple of bored constables will turn up a couple of hours later to "take some details".

The police are far too busy manning speed traps and booze buses, and filling in paperwork, to actually spare any time to catch - or even deter - criminals.

A measured response to such a juicy bait, Pericles. As I decade long past resident of Surry Hills I must agree with you. It is a fact that the entire community's expectations of timely police response are not being met.

Guns can deliver the same non-lethal services in the city as they do in the bush. Even when fired, they have a whole range of measured responses from a shot in the air before the "shoot to kill" that takes up so much of the head space of the ill-informed.

Blame it on TV, but the fact is a shoot to kill is, in most cases, the dumbest option. In real life people don't fall backwards when hit by a bullet. They keep going for more than enough time for a good swing with a machete. A shot to the groin, a hip or a knee, on the other hand will bring them down quick with a much lower risk of mortality and an equally low risk of prosecution for the shooter.

But getting back to this article, the really dishonest part of the analysis lies in the implication that Bryant's 35 victims were a once in a decade event. Only in perhaps Israel or Iraq would a single incident reach 35 deaths but these would be by bombing, not shooting. Bryant would be a decadal anomaly even in the USA but that has not stopped the Authors limiting their comparisons to the decade prior to 1996.

Bryant is more like a one in fifty year event or more and adjusting for this would drop the mass shooting average by 30% to about 7 a year, not 10. And when the pre-1996 period is extended beyond a single decade, this drops even lower to the point where some years register a nil record.

But this all obscures the fact that the real rise in all homicide coincides with the expansion of the drug culture in the late 60's and 70's. Gun laws merely treat symptoms while the cause remains untreated.

For people who want to own guns the issue is training its use and the security of the weapon. For example, with a revolver, the slot where the hammer rests should be empty. Clips and firing pins should be removed and the main weapon locked away. p.s. I don't own a gun.

Police unless on special calls should not be armed and should hand in their guns at day's end, unless there is a special need to carry the weapon. Herein, there have been too many sucides and accidents with police guns over the years.

Guns need to be secured, not eliminated. I resspect the right of people to own a gun to target shoot. Even, if I don't want a gun. Target shooting is a skill, like pool or hockey.

Lastly, 80,000 people die each year in Australia from smoking related illnesses. **perspective check**

The Law clearly allows the use of force to protect oneself from unlawful attack and if that attack is believed to be life threatening then one is allowed to use even deadly force.

For example if one is threatened with a firearm, by an intruder, then one is allowed to use a firearm to stop the attacker.

The problem is that the same Law does not allow one to have a firearm for the purpose of self defense, so in using a firearm to save one's life the law is broken or one must provide a reason why there was ammunition available and why the firearm was not in the gun safe at the time.

Seems a bit strange to me.