How right you are, Wobbles.
And I would add, that people with guns can kill LOTS of people.
A nut with a baseball bat or a knife can maybe kill one or two people before he/she is stopped.
A nut with an automatic weapon with a 100 round magazine can kill 12 people and injure 52 in a matter of seconds.
As we've just discovered.
That's the difference.
The nut cases will always be with us; they're part of the human condition.
But the damage they can do can be limited.
And one way is by limiting access to guns, especially high powered, large magazine automatic weapons.
Fortunately here in Australia, we've done that, and we are so much the better off for it.
I really feel for the millions of Americans who really want to see gun control, but are no match for the NRA's well oiled political machine.
Anthony
http://wwwobservationpoint.com.au

Dear Hasbeen,

Just taking that little extra time when reading a post might be useful. The study used real guns and real bullets.

Dear JoM,

Unfortunately 'flukes' seem to abound.

In 1997 14 year old Michael Carneal took a pistol into a prayer meeting and with eight shots hit eight moving targets killing three. Other than a few practice shots he had never fired a real handgun in his life.

Dave Grossman, an army psychiatrist and retired US Army Ranger who studied the case said “Nowhere in the annals of military or law enforcement history, can we find an equivalent achievement.”.

He goes on; “one state police study in an assessment of the accuracy of their officers across several years found that the average officer, in the average engagement, at the average distance of twenty-three feet, hit with 13 percent of the rounds fired.”

This was borne out when the following year four New York City cops, all very experienced, shot at one unarmed Amadou Diallo, firing forty-one bullets from barely fifteen feet away; fewer than half hit their mark.

Grossman writes “Michael Carneal . . . had fired thousands of bullets in the video game “murder simulators.” His superhuman accuracy, combined with the fact that he “stood still,” firing twohanded, not wavering far to the left or far to the right in his shooting “field,” and firing only one shot at each target, are all behaviors that are completely unnatural to either trained or “native” shooters, behaviors that could only have been learned in a video game. . . . These kind[s] of video games provide the “motor reflexes” responsible for over 75% of the firing on the modern battlefield.”

I think I'm happy taking the assessment of an ex Army Ranger as a good reason to stick with my stance.

Butcher,

Not all people kill people. Not all guns are used to kill people. But many people are killed by a combination of guns and people, people using guns to kill other people. Wobbles has got that right as usual.

Occasionally, a person uses his or her car to run someone else down, and in that sense cars kill people: cars in the hands of people.

So yes, guns in the hands of some people, kill other people. And pretty efficiently and quickly too. A bit more so than bare fists alone.

Cheers,

Joe

Joe, while I agree with you, and many other posters, the problem still remains, that being that we introduce laws to control less than 1% of the population, (nutters) while ignoring the rights of the remaining 99%, which are law abiding citizens.

Dear Butcher,

Poppycock.

Lets talk about rights if you like.

The gun buyback scheme impacted less than 200,000 Australians or less than 1% of our population.

The rights of the other 99% of us to not be constantly fearful of or even potentially be involved in a mass shooting in places like Hoddle Street or while holidaying with our families at places like Port Arthur were the ones served by Howard's actions. He recognised it, so should you.

I have owned and used weapons for hunting for over fifty years, I took no pleasure from the killing aspect but thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of hunting in natural surroundings.
So, from a basis of some experience I also support effective gun control if, as it seems, mass murder is eliminated.

Just a word though on behalf of the Americans. They do maintain a sense of balance, they are at "worst" consistent. They not only cultivate a gun culture which which allows for such obscenities as mass murder within their own country but they export the culture by example as well. Thirty-one thousand people die of gunshot wounds each year in America with another sixty-seven thousand being seriously injured.

America is reported to maintain a global military- industrial complex greater than the rest of the world combined with some nine hundred military bases spread around the world. What a waste one might say, but no all is not as it might seem. They maintain a balance, they murder people in other countries as well. Of course their innocent victims are actually only non-people and these actions are justified as collateral damage in the name of security and the priority of American interests. Don't you love them cowboys and boy don't it make you feel safe!

Anthonyve you do realise that GST. only came into existence because de-regulation reduced this country's tax base through the reduction of tarrifs and the loss of income tax from the three hundred odd thousand Australian's who subsequently lost their jobs. Sorry if I harbour a degree of cynicism but somebody commented recently that we had been supporting inefficient and uncompetitive industry and to an extent this would be true. But I ask are we more competitive now given that we are up against the volume of output from Asian free trade zones which employ slave labour at $2 a day?
Den71