Thank you Don, I appreciate your words.

I would add (and this will be my final contribution, as I see no point in trying to give CPR to a deceased equine) that I believe US governments, aided and abetted by the NRA and gun-manufacturers, rule by fear. They want you really, seriously, pants-shittingly scared. They love that there are hundreds of millions of guns in circulation, and that regulations are so feeble and so poorly enforced, because that helps keep the image of 'the bad guys' and 'the mad-dog killers', waiting around every corner to kill you and your families, at the forefront of citizens' minds. They actually like it that considerably more Americans have been killed by their fellow Americans since WW2 than were killed by enemy action during that conflict, because it keeps Americans scared. And scared people are easy to control.

Add to that the fact that you now have a president telling you that Mexicans are pouring over your border to rape your wives and daughters, and that Muslim immigrants are all potential terrorists who are trying to blow you up, and that school-teachers should serve the function of armed guards in schools, and the result is a paranoid, terrified population - a perfect customer-base for, guess who, the gun manufacturers. Well duh!

Don't believe me? Read Ol' Fuzz-Face's fear-filled, paranoid posts on this thread. He's scared shitless.

Until there's a sea change in culture, until the Establishment changes tack, recognises that fear is not a good tool, and starts to educate your people that violence begats only more violence, and until the power of the gun-lobby is faced up to and defeated, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of reducing the ludicrous number of guns in circulation, nor the appalling number of shooting-deaths and injuries.