Wal-Mart to bring back guns to hundreds of US stores

[scooterscot]

BBC News - Wal-Mart to bring back guns to hundreds of US stores

Imagine coming home from Sainsbury's with this. I really don't understand the world sometimes.

[centurian]

It's the US culture though. In the States, the gun is a symbol of freedom, whereas here (and most of Europe), it is an instrument of death.

[AtW]

the gun is a symbol of freedom

And so it should be!

Now that I can get Russian style bread in local Waitrose, the US style gun ownership is more or less the only thing I miss in this country

[Doggy Styles]

When I was at school, one of my mates got a .44 magnum from somewhere, and a single round. He used to regale us with stories of how they were so powerful, the US police used them to disable cars by shooting through the engine casing.

He liked motor bikes and had an old engine down the back of his garden and was dying to shoot this one bullet but not waste it, so he decided the old engine would make a perfect trophy with a bullet hole in it (he couldn't use the bullet for much else really, he wasn't a rude boy). He missed.

[russell]

Guns don't kill people.. people do.

[TykeMerc]

Guns don't kill people.. people do.

That's always been a stupid statement, It's a lot easier for people to kill people when they have a gun. That's why they were invented and developed.

[AtW]

That's why they were invented and developed.

They first were invented for soldiers to kill others, however once they went mass production and most population had access to them, suddenly guns became effective tools of self defence.

I think are around 200 mln firearms owned in USA, that's a very high figure.

[TykeMerc]

They first were invented for soldiers to kill others, however once they went mass production and most population had access to them, suddenly guns became effective tools of self defence.

I think are around 200 mln firearms owned in USA, that's a very high figure.

With a similarly high figure of gun crime/deaths/accidents.

A gun is a far more effective tool of threat than defence, they're designed for a single purpose, to kill.

[russell]

Owning a gun doesn't suddenly turn you into a killer, that's a very naive view. Cars probably kill more people than guns and we don't ban them do we?

[AtW]

With a similarly high figure of gun crime/deaths/accidents.

"On average in 2009, 93 people were killed on the roadways of the U.S. each day."

That's 33945 deaths per year.

Source: List of motor vehicle deaths in U.S. by year - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides,[5] with 17,352 (55.6%) of the total 31,224 firearm-related deaths in 2007 due to suicide, while 12,632 (40.5%) were homicide deaths.[6]"

Source: Gun violence in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Suicides is a personal matter so we have 12632 homicides vs 33945 deaths in car accidents.

It's the price of freedom - a guarantee that whoever tries to take it away from you will have to face an armed opponent ready to defend, not sheep prepared to be lead for slaughter.