Thanks both Freda Underhill and JennyO for all their stuff. Boring as GUEST thinks it is, it makes the point that we are not America, or England for that matter, but more importantly, that its amazing how much credibility a random bit of the universe has compared with a very easy check of facts through Criminology Dept or Aust Bureau of Stats (go Sandra yay!!!) Interesting aside - I was raised with guns and as a child it was our habit to carry around a .22 and if we were out in pig country, a 303. I was very familiar with guns. Ås an adult I had some beautiful ones - I think particularly of a beautiful Brazilian .22 10 automatic. That was a gorgeous gun. We never used to have to do anything but register the 22's in the local cop shop and everyone seemed to have a 303, particularly in the bush (have to say, both experience wise, and stats wise, very rarely were any of these used to shoot people). In the city I had my guns in the roof (4 of 'em) all cleaned and unpinned. Many of my friends were quite shocked to discover that I had guns. With the discussion around guns I decided to give them in. The reasons were, the most suicides were done by teenager boys/young men who found guns in the house - the murder weapon most used in domestic murders was through a gun in the home - armed robberies were usually done using weapons that had been found while doing a home break-in. My guns were at great risk of being used in a way that I never wanted them to be, and like my fellow Australians (over 90% despite the gun lobby) I handed them in to get crushed up and made useless. It was really hard with that .22 and worse when I found out later I didn't have to hand that one in - legally I could have kept it. Guns of course continue to be an issue throughout the world, not just here, but in every way, statistically, socially, crimewise, and so on, we have less relationship with them than the United States. This is not to say that we are a 'better' country but that our culture and history ensured that our gun relationship was based in other things. So many of us who had guns (a very minimal part of the population) have handed in our weapons that it is indeed extremely rare to find a gun anywhere legally in Åustralia. One of my brothers has a number of pistols for a number of reasons (all of them not being able to stand up to too much scrutiny in my opinion) and he has to have them underground locked in a box which is locked in a room whose access is locked and that access locked. Despite all this fairly useless stuff I am writing (rambling on I believe it is called) this is a timely reminder about guns and society mainly being that the point of guns is to kill whether it is owned by one person who in the name of an army and a country.