Golly! Various...

PDC - Yes, that's perfectly true. OTOH, if the laws were properly applied, they would likely weed out a lot of the emotionally unstable (such as Ryan & Hamilton, both of whom, AIUI, should have been prohibited from holding firearms). There's a world of difference between a crime of passion (sudden anger, sudden murder - be it with gun, kitchen knife, baseball bat, bare hands, etc), & premeditatedly going out to gun people down. Compare & contrast Dunblane & Hungerford with Wolverhampton? I think it was, where a nut ran amok in an infants school with a samurai sword. The teacher (Allison someone?) was badly injured protecting her pupils, but I don't remember that anyone died? It's much easier to kill indiscriminately with a gun, which is why they need to be controlled. It doesn't mean they need to be legislated out of civilian hands, which is an impossibility anyway.

Nerd - I may forgive you for that horrible pun(-ish)! Then again, it might be better for everyone if I just shot you... (with a bow & arrow, of course!) ;) The two fingers story has a couple of variants, but I believe it's approximately true. I'm sure your version isn't!

Guest - Yep, history IS wonderful! So's humanity - all those lessons to hand, on so many subjects, & we just never seem to learn... *sigh*

Nerd hit the nucleus of what I was driving at. Those acts were intended to ensure that there was an adequate body of men that the state could draw from at need. Neither the medieval statutes nor the second amendment, in my opinion, were intended to guarantee gun ownership to anyone who fancied one & claimed he wasn't a fruitcake! This is why I took particular care to draw the distinction between military & civil in my last post, which Nerd obviously picked up on.

It's pro-/anti- gun arguments that make me glad & relieved I'm English. Britain doesn't have a Constitution. No law here is written in stone. If a law is bad, or becomes obsolete, it can be changed or repealed. As an outsider, it's always struck me that the US Con. is not so much written in stone, as fossilized! You simply cannot suggest an alteration to any of the original clauses - it's (seemingly) a worse crime than desecrating a church or treason. Anyone know the last time one of the original amendments was modified? I know there've been a few added since the first draft, but I'm curious as to whether & when any of the first batch have been altered...

On the subject of poison (curare is S.American, I believe, kat), I wasn't suggesting that China didn't have knowledge, even extensive knowledge, of poisons, just that excrement is so much more... available... I'm also aware that Chinese medicine has been well developed for many centuries. Nevertheless, I reckon acute blood poisoning is something they'd have trouble dealing with! It's a fact that in Europe 50% of duels resulted in at least one fatality (I think I've remembered the quote correctly!), because the participants smeared the edges of their swords with shit. Not bubonic plague, gangrenous pus, or poison. Just common or garden regular-motions-per-day shit...

There are instances of victorious (i.e. killed opponent) duellists dying within a few days of winning, so I've been told. There is actually a wholly English fighting system, developed by an Elizabethan called George Silver, which has survived (thanks to the treatise he wrote, "Paradoxes of Defense") & has been revived in the modern world, based entirely on the concept of the no-score draw - the only way of being sure to survive a duel is to not be hit! It's no good running your enemy through the heart, if he kills you three days later... Nasty, but true! ;)