I never said your view was childish Dikki. I respect your view and anyone elses . I said that your question was child like because the question completely ignores all the other factors that affect gun murder rates and crime generally and your subsequent post barely touches them in the context of murder by guns. I also never said that there was no solution to the problem what ever you percieve that problem to be. You seem to think that there is only one solution. There are many potential solutions.

I gave examples of countries that have a much more relaxed attitude to guns , Sweden and Israel just as an example and there are a host of other 'civilised' (however you define that ) countries who have more relaxed gun laws.
Do they all have exactly the same problem as america ? Finland has a 30% gun ownership of its population and although they have a higher proportion (about double) of gun related homicide rates than the UK (including self defence killings and crimminals shot by the police) ) they have only a slightly higher rate of homicides ( about 1% difference ) in total when all deaths by homicide are taken into account .

Clearly licensed and lawful gun ownership is not the significant factor that you are trying to make it out to be.

Your example of escalating weapons just because home owners also might arm themselves is again child like and is not even worthy of debate.

And the country that was cast off becuase of their oppressive regime was repelled with guess what .....firearms. Had they not done so they would still no doubt be servants of the British empire. As an ex pat i understand why that may not be an issue for you but i think your american neighbours might have a different point of view.



[This message has been edited by spalding1968 (edited 03-30-2010).]