>>>>>>>Kids are addicted to candy, Americans are addicted to their guns.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Do you leave a child in a candy store and afterwards blame the child for eating too much candy?
>>>>>>>Do you blame the kid, or do you blame yourself for letting the kid have easy access to the candy?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>the analogy is the same. Its neither the candy or the gun who was guilty. But could you really blame the kid or the gun owner? No, its the enforcement of law that was guilty in preventing too easy access and preventing something that to happen that is pretty obvious from the start.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>But my point was that guns in the hands of well adjusted, properly socialized, non-criminal and mentally healthy individuals are not a threat.
>>>>>
>>>>>My point is that there are simply too many US citizens that do not fall into that category. If you have well behaved children that would accept that they can only look at the candy in the candy store and could not take some, there is no problem.
>>>>>
>>>>>However if you have kids that do not have such discipline, it would be foolish to enter the candy store and leave the kids alone and hoping they would not take any candy.
>>>>>
>>>>>Its a given fact that the cultural, social and economic circumstances of the US citizen is way different than the much compared swiss, but are still are determined that its ok to leave your kids alone in the candy store.
>>>>>
>>>>>You can't change the cultural, social and economic circumstances. What you can do is preventing from those kids to enter the candy store, but hell then the kids are screaming for their constitutional rights to enter the candy store. Absolutely madness if you ask me.
>>>>>
>>>>>Your further comments are not too far off on what my feeling is on the subject.
>>>>
>>>>If we were starting from scratch and there were not currently any guns floating around in the US I would be all for extremely limited availability. But that isn't what we have and we have to deal with what is there. Addressing mental health, social conditions that beget a culture of violence and removing those who are violent predators is, to my mind, a more workable solution. All else is political theater.
>>>
>>>In software development, you often have to deal with crappy code that will break as soon as you touch it. If you reach that point, it is time for a rewrite. The longer you wait the worse things get.
>>
>>Do you really think Federal confiscation of at least 700 million guns is feasible? Are you seriously proposing this is a solution for the situation as it exists?
>
>How do you think it was implemented in other countries? If you give something like a $10 - $100 (or any other reward system) for each gun that they turn in, implement the stricter gun laws at the same time, I'm convinced that many guns will be taken out of the society without to much effort.

Charles is right. Confiscating that many guns, especially given our gun culture, is not do-able. Gun reward systems have been done many times. They usually collect a few but the fact remains that we still have more guns than people. And the real crux is that a lot of Americans, probably half, want guns and will not give them up willingly. Not in the sense of shootouts but in the sense of doing everything possible to oppose any form of gun control.

I gave up on the notion of European style gun control some time ago. I still have some hope for meaningful control of semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons. Even there, though, I am not
optimistic. Kevin Marois posted a link the other day stating that a majority of Americans are opposed to such a ban.