So the UK's safer now we have draconian gun control?
Sure, it may feel that way if you're a white person in a 'safe' neighbourhood, but try telling that to young black kids in Brixton, Stamford Hill, Moss Side or St Paul's.
The fact is, there is now more firearms related crime on the streets of British cities since the knee-jerk response to the Dunblane tragedy, not less. The new laws that were rushed in under pressure from the Snowdrop campaign and the tabloid press have not made a blind bit of difference.
If you want to get hold of a gun in Britain it isn't difficult - you can pick up a basic .38 for around sixty quid (provided you don't fire it - if you actually want to use it, it'll cost you more like £300 because of the buggerance that comes from ballistics).
Nearly all the guns in circulation are either 'souvenirs', which have never been licensed, or illegal imports (with a growing number of workshop-converted replicas and tailor-mades). So what darned use have the gun laws been for the scores of kids who have been killed and wounded on our streets?
The fact that Ryan and Hamilton commited their crimes with legally-held firearms should have been seen as a chance to sort out the licensing, not to ban all pistols and curtail the ownership of other firearms. And, in the field of shotguns and rifles, the licensing has been sorted. All applicants for shotgun certificates and Part One firearms licences now have their backgrounds thoroughly checked, along with those of their referees (who have to be two people of good standing - JPs, MPs doctors etc in the case of a firearms licence), and they have to give a reason for owning a firearm, stating what it will be used for and where.
Personally I'm not in favour of the free-for-all that seems to exist in some states of the USA, where you can buy an assault rifle over the counter, but I'd like someone to tell me why, as a law-abiding Englishman, I shouldn't be able to participate in pistol-shooting on a safe range if I wanted to do so.
So go easy on the Yanks - it's their country and it's up to them what they do there, provided it doesn't make life worse for the rest of us (as in Kyoto, but that's another matter). If you don't like what they do, don't go there and don't buy their kit. Otherwise give it a bloody rest.
I've had enough of my fellow countrymen being mealy-mouthed and proscriptive about what I do here, and now it seems they want to impose those views on others thousands of miles away. Honestly, with threads like this, you can understand why the colonials got so pissed off in 1776!