>>I'm not going to say whether any citizen with a gun would have been able to stop the shooter. So that individual with the NRA (and Mike Huckabee) are going too far in their claims that a citizen with a gun would have made a difference. No one can say. But I'll state the fact that nine people were killed with absolutely NO MEANS OF DEFENSE. I defy anyone here to challenge that fact. If there are going to be new laws or changes to laws, they need to address THAT context.
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>Kevin the fact is that within in The Netherlands 99.99% of all citizens are having NO MEANS of defense other than that it is a lot harder for a lunatic (yes we had our share as well) to get one. Only criminals walk with guns on the street, often automatic as well, but they arr almost exclusively used to kill eachother. This is something I can live with. BTW, this applies to the majority of European countries.
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>Simple fact: If there are no guns, no one gets killed by (someone holding) a gun. If there are less guns, less people are going to be killed by a gun. Put in more guns, more people are going to be killed by a gun. IMO, only an idiot would not agree with that.
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>As for the lunatic argument, The law abiding citizen of today can become the lunatic of tomorrow. Some people have the idea that lunatics can be identified at birth or even in adult life. That is insane.


Embolded: Except for Switzerland. And yes, there ARE some deaths in Switzerland done with those weapons, some of which would probably NOT have happened without a gun in personal reach, some of which probably would have happened with other tools.

But the numbers really are on another scale compared to the US, which I attribute to in part to the ease of getting saturday night specials and in part to gloryfying their gun past. But you will not find me amongst those arguing that even one death is too much - after WWII western europe had a long stretch of peace which is nearly unparallelled in history. I do not think human behaviour has changed significantly forever - we were just lucky that
a) we had the fear of the A-bomb and
b) that it was not used.

I do not think, Jews would have been able to defend themselves back then if they had had arms - too much TV "expirience" in this US in the belief of the hero holding off countless others for my taste. But having people think about such issues, train them to use their weapons responsibly and keep them safely is (IMO!) in the long run safer than educating the whole population to carry olive twigs and white flags, even if it carries a death toll in peace times as well. Small arms should be an exception, not approaching the norm as it seems to be in the states.

my 0.02 €

thomas