Oh, I fully understand those things, oldude - I'm pretty well-travelled, I've spent time in bear-country, I understand what can face the people who live in wild places. I have no problem whatsoever with those who live 'out there' having the means to protect themselves from what the wild can throw at them.

But my point was that 'guns are the preferred weapons of criminals' precisely because you have a virtually unlimited supply of guns, with ineffectual, or un-enforced, regulation. Read my post again - we have strong, effective regulations which are enforced, strong restrictions on who can possess a gun and the kind of gun they can have, and very few people feel any need or desire for a gun. The result is very few guns in circulation amongst even the criminals, and the criminals tend to use them on each other, not on their victims.

You 'need' guns because you have them, they're a part of your culture, a hang-over from the Wild West which still pervades your psyche.

What you truly need over there is some outside-the-box thinking, education that civilised societies do not need to be dominated by the gun, a policy of change to bring about a reversal to the national paranoia that there's a 'bad guy' around every corner waiting to kill you.

But with the NRA and the armaments industry holding such enormous power in the US, and with weak government seemingly in eternal control, much as it saddens me to say it, I don't believe you have a cat in hell's chance of civilising yourselves to the level that has been achieved in the UK, Australia, and many otherFirst World countries.

You're right, the UK is tiny, geographically, in comparison with the US, but we have one-sixth of your population, and we live in a densely-populated Island, but we have governments who are not afraid to take action over gun-crime, and who are prepared to regulate to keep guns off our streets and out of the hands of people who don't need them, or would mis-use them.

We're not living in a perfect land, it's not Utopia, but gun-crime here is a tiny fraction of gun-crime in the US, But the majority of people here neither have, need, or want firearms, and they live safe, happy, unafraid lives without the fear and paranoia that has seemingly become 'The American Disease'.