[Rory Waterman]

It worked in Australia. You'd need to have a system whereby currently owned weapons are declared illegal and are bought back to be destroyed - which I think is what happened there. It never will happen in the US, though, because there are too many millions and millions of voting gun-adorers and they're not declining in number. And I don't see any such breast-beating about the American people - which would be especially misplaced in a thread about gun massacres, even if it happened to be a thread started by one such gun-toting American at least partly in order to extol the virtues of gun ownership. Tim, for example, is a kind and wonderful man, but I find his attitude towards guns utterly bewildering. There are lots of people with very similar or identical views in the US, quite obviously, and I think they would feel very lonely living in almost any other country on the planet where people do not share and can't entertain their views. I think it is fair and justified to say that the pervasive attitude towards guns in most of the USA seems manifestly insane and reckless and frightening to almost everyone in this country and probably every other country - and to a sizeable minority of Americans, too. But the gun lobby will go nowhere and next year there'll be 11,000 more - or more than a third as many as there are road traffic deaths in the same (car-loving) country - including twenty or so massacres. It's too fundamentally awful to breastbeat about.