I knew that. I was just being silly.

Thank you BadAim.

Well said sir.

S!

Ahh, you've reinforced ruggbutt's assertion that "an armed society is a polite society". Sternjaeger just can't be polite because he's been forcibly disarmed, whereas ruggbutt has no such problem.

As far as "political correctness" goes, Titus; here in the states it's source is the same as that which would disarm us, thus the correlation in our minds of the two. I assume Sternjaeger thinks similarly.

me too. :P

Don't forget the RAF which can be billeted comfortably in Italian hotels and from there bomb Africa, as they have been doing these past few months. Personally I would much rather live in a hotel in Italy than on a ship, so this represents a major step forward for the British Empire.

Agree, and also to all reading this: think about those lovely petite females, who could avoid being robbed, raped and killed if they have a small pistol tucked away discreetly in their purses.

I think of them more than all others. It is the weakest who are benefited most by going armed. An armed woman protecting her children is a creature of a ferocity and deadliness that nature could never match.

There is a nasty trend in my home state over the last few years where elderly or imfirmed people are subject to home invasions, they inevitably get bashed and even raped in some cases, while the criminals get away with little more than pension money and family heirlooms.

About year ago a bloke of about 80 had to justify his actions for shooting a home invader. The media put him through the ringer until the facts of the incident came through.

The criminal was shot pulling the shotgun from the old guys hands, to get to be shot he and his friends had kicked in the front door, ransacked the house for half an hour and then had to bash down the old guys bedroom door where he had barricaded himself. He even warned the criminals that he was armed.

From my ( and eventually the courts) point of view the old guy did everything reasonably possible to avoid hurting anyone while protecting himself.

Unfortuanately there is a small element of our societies that cannot be reasoned with.

Cheers!

In my home state of Ohio in the US we have what's called a Castle law, as in every man's home is his castle.

We no longer have to retreat to the farthest point possible in the home before defending ourself. If someone breaks in, it is assumed he/she is not there to make friends, and defending oneself and one's home is your right.

I think I understand the proplem for our US contributors: they probably do not want to come out and say that other peoples do not have the right to decide their own gun laws, since this is so obviously unreasonable, but they worry that the arguments used by other peoples to reach the conclusion that stringent gun controls are a good thing might be applied to the US too, and be used by the government to undermine or limit their current rights to carry arms. So not being content to defend their own gun laws they feel the need to criticise other people's laws as well.

At the extreme, to safeguard the 2nd Amendment from the dreaded "wedge" argument, the rights of all other nations in the world to manage their own affairs according to their own traditions, culture and laws has to be, if not denied outright, denigrated, held up to ridicule and contempt, and condemned as a slippery slope on the road to totalitarian enslavement.

So I would really appreciate it if any of the US contributors would step up to the plate, play the game, man up, stop evading the issue, and state whether or not they believe that the people of the UK, via the mechanism of their own constitution and law, have the self-evident right to limit the right to keep and bear arms.

Come on, you know you want to...;-)