"Happily we haven't had to live in a society where citizens are not trusted to own guns, so we don't have a perverted view on the matter."

It's not a case of trusted - people where I live (UK) don't want to own guns, don't feel the need to own guns and don't care for the consequences of a gun culture. This is law by common consent - there is no public desire for ordinary people to own guns, or for ordinary police officers to carry them.

Where there is a gun culture in our inner cities it is largely confined to a certain demographic and rarely spills into the mainstream, and it's results are as ugly as they are anywhere else. Apart from one or two nutters every now and then (such as Hungerford in 1987), we don't have the wholsesale massacres that happen in the states (touch wood). I don't know what the figure for firearms-related deaths are, but I'll put my money on there being a hell of a lot less here than in the US. If you trust your citizens to own guns, why do you bleat so much when one goes off the rails and slaughters some innocent because they want to be noticed in the media-centric world they inhabits in their deluded mind?

Whose view is perverted? I don't condone the owning of lethal weapons by the general population - why would I? If you think that's a healthy society, you're welcome to it. There is a real culture of violence in the US that disturbs many people in the wider world, and it's insidious influence is being felt in many other societies, especially amongst the young.

There is so much machismo associated with this subject it's almost laughable. I wouldn't pry your gun from your cold dead hands because I don't feel so insecure where I live to have to cart around a deadly weapon to make myself feel better. I don't need a gun to make me a 'real man', or because some bloke 200 years ago had to defend his homestead from an foreign power. I don't need an AK47 high-power semi-automatic M16 Winchester recoilless dick extension. And luckily, I guess a lot of Americans don't either. Thank Christ.