Originally Posted by
montesquieu
Guns are a funny thing. As a typical townie (even thought I've lived in or near the country for much of my adult life) I've never seen the point personally. I recall going to Ireland to visit family in about 1968 (when I was seven), coming into Larne and seeing RUC officers carrying real guns in holsters, which looked absolutely enormous compared to the little toy cap guns we played cowboys and indians with. Obviously they were doing this for good reason at the time, but it scared the hell out of me and I'm not sure I ever quite got over it. I went shooting rabbits with a .22 once with one of the teachers at school and a small group, I was a bit sickened by that thankfully almost every shot missed.
I was also a journalist in the Scotsman newsroom the day the Dunblane massacre happened, when a colleague and good friend sitting next to me had to go home because his kids were at Dunblane primary (a different age than the class that were killed, thankfully, but he didn't know that in those days before widespread mobile phones, as he jumped in his car for the 45-minute journey back from Edinburgh). Seldom has a news event had such a personal impact. Essentially nobody in Scotland had any objection to the law banning handguns that followed, and to hell with the Olympic squad who had to start training in France.
And yet .. I have friends who enjoy shooting rifles on ranges, who get a thrill from the precision of the whole thing and who take safety incredibly seriously.
I'm not quite sure where airgun use fits in this, most people who own them seem to get off on shooting rabbits or squirrels or whatever but I don't personally see the joy in that. But then again I don't see the fun in stamp collecting, in dressing up in lycra to go cycling, or in dogging, for that matter. I suppose it takes all sorts.
What is unfortunate is that any rational debate on guns in America has been lost in the culture wars, which is an out and out tragedy. I guess the only conclusion you can draw is that as a society they are happy on some level to trade off 30,000 gun deaths a year (vs a few dozen in most other countries) against some nebulous idea of freedom - not an equation most of us in the rest of the civilised world could go along with.
Ultimately I'm pretty happy with laws as tight as you can make them, there are a lot of idiots out there but somehow we manage (for the most part) in keeping guns out of their hands, whereas they utterly fail to do that in America. Long may our strict gun laws continue and if a few people on the margins of getting permision or affording permits are inconvenienced by that then I have no problem. The very fact that firearms are very tightly restricted here means that it's a big step to carry them and while obviously some people choose to break the law, it will be far fewer than if our laws were more lax.