Inescapable fact: with 300,000,000 or so guns in existence, *no* imaginable gun laws can reduce the incidence of shootings - whether by gangsters, enraged spouses, psychotics, nine-year-old girls, or the nearly nonexistent krazed kops - to anything like zero.

Is this so hard to understand?

The best we can do is to do as much as practicable to restrict gun sales to sane and responsible people who want a reasonable number of guns to protect themselves and their families. What's a reasonable number? I'd say in a four-person household, two or three would be about the limit - one for each parent (I know, it's hard to imagine the necessity) and one for the household.

But of course, no such limit will ever be imposed because the Founders, who had no concept of either semi-automatic weapons, armored vehicles, vast criminal networks, or instantaneous communication among nut groups, said (or seemed to say) that no Federal law would ever infringe the right to bear arms.

A "God-given right" some insist (though not the Founders, please note).

Getting back to the general Yank-bashing for a moment, I recall a moment a very smug British or Canadian individual ridiculed America's Constitutional Founding Fathers as a bunch of "backwoods lawyers."

A neat example of the proud ignorance and childish sarcasm of so many of his or her ilk.