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After some incidents americans citizens are questioning the american gun law, and thereby appealing to gun control. I personally think otherwise, than the democrats and Obama(Gun Policy), gun control is the wrong way to prevent future incidents, like the Burgers & Bullets closing and the 2 year old killer (others). This is not because I am a heavy-user of guns, but on the other hand against regulations, bills, rules, etc. which violate our personal freedom and rights. So when people begin debating and questioning “some of” our personal rights, I think it is time to step up and defend them. We should defend our right to make the decisions ourselves, because nobody make them for us!

In the diagram to the right, you see a stable enhancement of “Gun Deaths” from 1999-2011, that some claim to be caused by the gun law. They actually point out the gun law, as the killer of mentioned victims, but they forget who the real killer is. In referenced link (others), the animation describes the real problem here, it’s not guns who kill people - people kill people. So blaming guns on the enhancement of “Gun Deaths” is quite oafish.

The diagram with a comparison, privately owned firearm, respectively between the US and Denmark. Here we see the US as the mayor “winner” of the race, which naturally seems negative to some, while I and other find this extremely positive. In my opinion this only shows how the personal rights in the US is valued much higher than in Denmark. On the other hand I think the numbers from Denmark is relatively negative.
The US gun policy shouldn’t be changed and blamed for things that the real killer did. Watch out for the real killer!

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Guns don't kill

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Obama Angry at Gun Control Defeat: ‘Shameful Day for Washington’

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A visibly angry President Obama, reacting to the defeat of an exceedingly modest gun control measure, called it "a pretty shameful day for Washington " when the wishes of 90 percent of the American people can't be translated into Senate action.

The president spoke with more emotion and for a more sustained period of time than he has publicly on any issue, castigating the minority of senators who blocked the measure and saying he wanted to talk "plainly and honestly about what's happened here."

Standing in the Rose Garden on Wednesday with the parents of Sandy Hook children who lost their lives and former Rep. Gabby Giffords, Obama made no attempt to hide his outrage at the Republican-led filibuster that killed the bill "even as these families looked on from the Senate gallery." A handful of Democrats stood with the GOP as 90 percent of Democrats supported the measure, "but it's not going to happen because 90 percent of Republicans voted against it," Obama said.

The battle lines are drawn on the gun issue. It is now officially a wedge issue that Democrats will campaign on in an effort to capitalize on public support for what Obama calls common sense gun measures. And while the failure to get 60 votes in the Senate to overcome the filibuster is a defeat for Obama, he was not going to go down without a fight. "I see this as just Round 1," he said.

Obama said he talked to a number of senators-"they're all good people," he added parenthetically-but that most couldn't offer any good reason why background checks shouldn't be strengthened, "no coherent argument, it came down to politics." Some claimed the measure wouldn't stop anything, but if action by Congress could have saved one child, "We had an obligation to try, and this legislation met that test, and too many senators failed theirs," Obama said.

He assailed the NRA and the gun lobby, saying they "willfully lied" in claiming the bill would create a Big Brother registry when it did the opposite, making such data-keeping a felony. "All that happened today is the preservation of a loophole," Obama said, his disgust with the process evident. Guns can still be bought at gun shows and over the Internet without a background check.

Recounting charges from the gun lobby that the Newtown families were being used as a prop and for emotional blackmail, Obama asked incredulously, "Are they serious?" He sounded indignant that anyone would question the right of families torn apart by gun violence to petition their elected representatives.

Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son Daniel died at Sandy Hook, said that while the vote was disappointing, "We are not defeated, and we will not be defeated." He introduced the president in the Rose Garden and before turning the podium over to Obama, he recited the Sandy Hook Promise: "Our hearts are broken, our spirit is not."

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Obama Angry at Gun Control Defeat: 'Shameful Day for Washington'

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A visibly angry President Obama, reacting to the defeat of an exceedingly modest gun control measure, called it "a pretty shameful day for Washington " when the wishes of 90 percent of the American people can't be translated into Senate action.

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United States — Gun Facts, Figures and the Law

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Two-Year-Old Boy Shoots Mother Dead At Walmart

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Sky News - First For Breaking News From The UK And Around The World

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Sky News - First for Breaking News, video, headlines, analysis and top stories from business, politics, entertainment and more in the UK and worldwide.

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Burgers & Bullets: Shooting Range Closes After irl, 9, Kills Instructor

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Just days after a little girl lost control of an automatic weapon during a shooting lesson and accidentally killed her instructor, the gun range where the horrifying incident took place has closed.

Following massive amounts of controversy, the shooting range where a 9-year-old girl accidentally shot her gun instructor, Charles Vacca, 39, has closed it's doors. There is no word on whether or not the range will ever open again after this fatal accident made international headlines.

Burgers & Bullets Closes Doors After Girl, 9, Shoots Instructor By Mistake

The shooting range that allowed a 9-year-old girl to handle an automatic weapon has finally closed it's doors.

Following a fatal accident that left a 39-year-old shooting instructor dead, Burgers & Bullets stopped doing business indefinitely, reports The Inquisitr.

It turns out that the range is actually an extremely popular tourist destination at the Arizona Last Stop, and as HollywoodLife.com previously reported it allows children as young as 8 years old to take lessons.

According to it's own website, Burgers & Bullets specializes in allowing visitors to shoot a "wide range of fully automatic machine guns." What is even more disturbing is that the website glorifies the idea of shooting automatic weapons by using images from hit Hollywood films such as Rambo, Terminator, and Jumanji.

Take Our Poll

There is no word on whether or not Burgers & Bullets will ever open it's doors again after this tragic incident.

Girl Was With Her Parents When She Accidentally Killed Instructor

The young girl, who remains unidentified, was visiting Burgers & Bullets with her family - including her parents - at the time of the accident.

In the video of her shooting lesson, you can see Charles, the instructor, tell the gun to fire one single shot with an Uzi after adjusting the way she was standing. The shot goes off, and he tells her she did "good" before turning the gun on to what he calls "full auto."

This time, the little girl clearly loses control of the gun as soon as she pulls the trigger and it turns to her left - exactly where her instructor was standing. Thankfully the video cuts off before Charles is hit by the stray bullet, but he was reportedly airlifted to University Medical Center after being shot in the head.

Sadly, he died a few hours later from the injuries. The girl's parents were standing nearby recording her shooting lesson when the shooting happened. They reportedly signed waivers to allow their 9-year-old to learn how to shoot an Uzi.

Our thoughts go out to Charles' friends and family during this very difficult time.

More Related News:

1. Will Hayden: 'Sons Of Guns' Star Accused Of Raping Daughter, 11

2. Girl, 9, Accidentally Shoots Her Gun Instructor Dead With An Uzi

3. Mo'ne Davis: Little League Pitcher's Autographs Spark Controversy

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Burgers & Bullets: Shooting Range Closes After Girl, 9, Kills Instructor

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Following massive amounts of controversy, the shooting range where a 9-year-old girl accidentally shot her gun instructor, Charles Vacca, 39, has closed it's doors. There is no word on whether or not the range will ever open again after this fatal accident made international headlines.

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Against Gun control

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This list serves as a rebuttal of the Listverse list " 10 Arguments for Gun Control " by Morris M. This list is not intended to incite controversy, but to foster an even-sided debate. The issue of gun control is global, but since it is most controversial in the United States of America, that nation is referred to most in the following entries.

The US Constitution's Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

10 There Is Murder In The UK

Almost all handguns are banned from civilian possession, ownership, purchase, or sale in the United Kingdom as a result of the Second Firearms Act of 1997. This was in response to the Dunblane Massacre, in which 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton walked into an elementary school and shot dead 16 children, aged six or younger, and one teacher before killing himself. He used four handguns.

Now that modern handguns are no longer legal to have in the UK, let us take a look at some murder rates. The rate for intentional homicide in the UK in 1996-the year of the Dunblane Massacre-was 1.12 per 100,000. It was 1.24 in 1997, when the Firearms Act went into effect, and 1.43 in 1998. The rate rose to a peak of 2.1 in 2002 and has fallen since to 1.23 as of 2010. These numbers have, however, been called into question due to possible under-reporting of violent crimes in the UK.

It cannot be denied that the rate of homicides via guns has fallen dramatically since Dunblane, but the rate of murders has gone up. To say these higher numbers are the result of fewer people able to arm themselves for defense is drastically jumping to a conclusion, but the fact does remain that more people are killing each other in the UK today than when guns were legal to have. Even the police are almost all armed with tasers instead, so handguns are very hard to come by. All the numbers are higher in the US, of course, where there are more people, and there have been no more school shootings in the UK since Dunblane.

But in 2005, there were 765 intentional murders in the UK and most of these were committed with knives. Blunt objects follow, then strangulation, fire, and poison. Banning guns has halted rampage shootings, but it does not address the issue of people killing each other. In the US, the number of intentional homicides in 2004 was 10,654-a number that would have been much lower without access to guns, but still terribly high. Opponents of gun control are always quick to question how many victims of knives, clubs, and strangulation would be alive if they had had a gun.

9 Literary Infallibility

Thomas Jefferson once wrote "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." Gun enthusiasts often couple this with a quote from Ben Franklin, "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

Unfortunately, Franklin never said that. It was probably written by someone on the Internet, who then tacked his name onto it. But Jefferson's premise of not limiting the freedom of the press can extend to any freedom. Right now, American legislators are up in arms, if you'll pardon the pun, over the question of whether to limit some firearms' ammunition capacities. Proponents cite the only obvious use for an assault rifle-killing people-and defend ammunition limitations as a compromise that will save lives. Opponents maintain that a single life lost due to some maniac with a gun is just as excessive as 30.

The issue of fully automatic firearms has been a hotbed for a long time. In some states, they are legal for civilians, provided that an extra fee is paid. In North Carolina, a fully automatic M2HB .50 Browning heavy machine gun is perfectly legal to use as a home defense weapon or for hunting. This is because that state considers any limitation of guns to be unconstitutional. California does not agree. In that state, no semiautomatic firearm may contain more than 10 rounds at any time. Assault rifles are completely banned. There are some federal limits: no caliber is permissible larger than .50 unless a special and expensive license is obtained and cannons are legal to own but not to fire with real ammunition.

The debates will go on for a very long time, and most of them center on the Constitution's wording of the Second Amendment. How should we define "a well-regulated militia"? Proponents of gun control claim this should entail proper training. Opponents claim that almost all gun owners train themselves in their free time. They further claim that, should any affront be made to the Second Amendment, those who want to control guns will no longer have any line to cross. They will interpret as they see fit any word or phrase of any Amendment in order to limit more and more rights until, in this case, all guns are banned from civilian use.

8 The Civilian Need For Assault Rifles

An assault rifle is any weapon which fires high-powered rifle rounds rather than pistol rounds, semi or fully automatically. The weapon reloads each round on its own-all you have to do is pull the trigger again and again. It is true that these weapons were invented for the purpose of warfare, not hunting, though they can be used for either. Proponents of even limited gun control maintain that, if nothing else is done, assault rifles should have magazines of no more than 10 rounds at a time. The argument typically brought out in defense of this position claims that in any self-defense scenario, assault rifles are overkill.

Gun control opponents, however, have long argued that the Second Amendment was put in place not just for ordinary home defense against burglars but specifically to guarantee that the nation could never be overcome by any military power foreign or domestic. If the five branches of the US military were beaten by, say, a nuclear holocaust, the only national defense left would be the civilians themselves. Any subsequent military invasion-probably armed with AK-47 variants-would find it very easy to overrun civilians armed only with lever, bolt, and pump action weapons.

7 Welcome To Texas

The first modern school shooting occurred on August 1, 1966 and deservedly made national headlines because no one had ever heard of such diabolical insanity. If you have a problem with your boss, you might get mad and shoot him, but sniping innocent random strangers from up to 400 yards for 90 minutes somehow makes even less sense. Whitman's tower rampage on the University of Austin was not the first school shooting in the sense of a single maniac killing indiscriminately, but it was possibly the first to push the notion into the public eye. It was a direct cause of the institution of SWAT teams among city police forces around the nation. There were none before this incident, and the Austin police found themselves woefully outgunned at the outset.

They were considerably aided, in Ramiro Martinez's opinion, by several dozen students and passersby who did not take cover, but instead ran to their vehicles and brought back hunting rifles. They then took cover alongside police officers and opened fire on the observation deck, forcing Whitman to take cover and fire less often and less accurately. Martinez was one of the three officers who entered the tower and killed Whitman, and he thanked the civilians for their assistance. Whitman would certainly have killed many more than 12 from the 28th story observation deck had he not been harried by the civilians' return fire.

6 It Didn't Work For Germany

On March 10, 2009, 28-year-old Michael McClendon shot 10 people dead in a spree that covered three counties of Alabama. Gun control was immediately revived in national debates, primarily because he used two assault rifles for most of the rampage. He also had a shotgun and a pistol. McClendon had left a suicide note in which he made it clear that he despondent and enraged over his dead-end life. He began the spree by shooting his own mother, all three of her dogs, and burning down her house. He then drove down the highway shooting random people from his vehicle.

The gun control debate did not reach fever pitch, however, until a German high school student initiated a very similar rampage the next day in Winnenden, Baden-Wurttemberg, in southwestern Germany. Seventeen-year-old Timothy Kretschmer began at Albertville-Realschule, where he murdered 12 people, most of them women, then carjacked Igor Wolf and forced him to drive Kretschmer to the town of Wendlingen. While in the backseat, Kretschmer reloaded his magazines and answered Wolf's question of why he had done it. "For fun. Because it's fun." He ordered Wolf off the road near a car dealership and ran inside, murdered two more people, and then shot it out with the police, wounding two and being wounded in both legs. He opened fire on every random person he could see, then shot himself.

He killed 15 and wounded nine, all with a single 9mm pistol. This was his father's gun, since he was too young to own one, and it was the only gun his father had not locked in a safe. He had illegally kept it out and loaded in case of burglary. This is not illegal in the US. Here, we see that a child, who should not have been able to acquire a gun, did so in a nation with extremely strict laws on gun control.

5 Gun Control Equals Absolute Despotism

Of all arguments against controlling guns, this one crystallizes everything the ravenous pro-gun crowd has had to say over the years. Most Americans do not trust their government, or more properly, the people who hold the highest positions in it. This was the feeling long before Edward Snowden leaked proof of the government spying illegally on its own citizens and nations around the world. Snowden deemed this too similar to "Big Brother," as Orwell calls it, but the US government not only disagreed with him, it even defended what it was doing as not in any way criminal, though its own law books clearly differ. Snowden is not without supporters. Twitter has erected security firewalls to guard against NSA spying, and Google, Facebook, and Tumblr have followed suit.

Pro-gun citizens consider their guns the same protection. They arm themselves for the possibility of government agents taking away their rights one by one until they live in a police state in which the government is able to do anything it wants because the civilian populace is unarmed and cannot resist. In these terms, any gun control is viewed as a threat to liberty, and though the Constitution guarantees rights, it does not enforce anything. Guns do.

The Snowden fiasco in particular brought the rampant and frighteningly amoral dishonesty of the federal government back once again to the front of global debate, since America had been spying on China, France, Germany, and even Great Britain against their wishes. The pro-gun American citizens have seized on this embarrassment as yet more proof that the government is out to take away its citizens' rights, as many as possible until democracy is gone and tyranny is in place. Tthe only truly effective protection of American citizens' rights to freedom of speech, press, religion, and others are their guns.

4 Rampage Shooters Like Soft Targets

If rampage killers are so depressed that they intend to kill themselves afterward, then why hasn't anyone whipped out an assault rifle and attempted to kill people inside the US Bullion Depository near Fort Knox? Because breaking into the White House would be a lot easier. Do these shooters fear the firepower lurking around the gold? Not if they want to die, but what they do fear is not killing a lot of people beforehand. They have a rage in them, and it appears to be always the same. Motive or not, they want to exact revenge. The more dead, the merrier. The media, of course, is largely to blame for turning any shooting incident into a circus. Presently, a lovers' spat that boils over in public will make brief national headlines as a possible rampage scene.

The James Holmeses, the Cho Seung-huis, and Adam Lanzas are the sort who want to one-up the last massacre, and this can't be done in a bank. The police are on the lookout for the banks and there aren't enough people anyway. It can't be done at the White House or a police station, but malls, schools, ordinary workplaces, and churches are all soft and rich targets because they contain many people and few of them are armed.

Suppose there were a guarantee that everyone in a church on Sunday morning were armed to the teeth-pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles, and more importantly, that they were all trained to fight back. Even the most desperately depressed rage-a-holic would pick a different target. The Amarillo school district in the good ol' state of Texas has gone to the extreme of arming its entire faculty and staff as a warning to would-be maniacs. This means the teachers, janitors, groundskeepers, and secretaries all have guns on their person.

3 The Eighteenth Amendment

This amendment prohibited the production, transport, and sale of alcohol within the United States of America. It was a result of the Temperance Movement. Most of the politicians in Washington, DC strongly supported the imposition of the ban, but when it went into effect on January 17, 1920, the public responded in a way that neither the temperance movement nor the politicians had expected-few people heeded the criminalization, and those who had been manufacturing alcohol continued doing so regardless of the law. Everyone seemed haughtily recalcitrant and alcohol use flourished even more than before. The police around the country were woefully ineffective in curbing its production, sale, or consumption.

Career criminals like Al Capone became extremely rich by gaining control over the importation to entire cities. Those too afraid of the police resorted to making their own booze at home, and this resulted in many deaths from poisoning.

Replace every reference to alcohol above with a reference to guns and you have the most assured aftermath of a similar prohibition on guns-except in this scenario, the crimes involved are much deadlier. The Al Capones who rise up will attempt to gain control over a city's illegal importation of guns, and there will be street violence worse than that of the most dangerous areas of Chicago today.

The public outcry leading up to the national ban might not cause a nationwide uprising. Such a disaster can only be conjectured as alternate history fiction, but if the government enforced the ban by raiding homes and businesses, there would certainly be small-scale uprisings that easily spread. Martial law would have to be imposed in some large cities, especially in Texas. Texas might actually make good on its common threat to secede, since it does retain a provision in its state constitution which permits this. There would be civil war, but with much deadlier weapons. The war would probably not be fought in as open a form as the previous Civil War, but those who refuse to relinquish their firearms would engage in guerrilla warfare and splinter cell terrorism. None of this is to say that the US military, if loyal to the ban, could not put down such rebellion to it, but the consequences would be horrific and long-lasting.

2 Laws Do Not Apply To Criminals

We've all heard this one many times, but a point of contention that just won't go away must be quite convincing to some. Gun laws are all founded on the principle of making a nation safer by limiting its civilian population's access to guns, but laws against murder and violence do not apply to those who have given up on life and intend to die while killing as many people as they can. Laws against theft do not apply to a person who intends to steal something. The sole thing the criminally-minded care about is not getting caught. Some are reformed in prison, but in large part, those who want to break a law are not going to feel remorse when they are caught. Give them a chance and they will do it again.

From this perspective, it is difficult to fathom the logic of enacting newer, stricter gun laws on an already lawful society. Most of us obey such laws. Sale of guns is forbidden within the city limits of Chicago, an ordinance that went into effect in 2010. For the year 2013, the city's murder count is 374. There were 432 in 2010 and 500 in 2012. The FBI has named Chicago the nation's murder capital. Thus, the city ordinance did nothing to reduce its murder rate.

None of this is to imply that in areas of well-armed civilians, the violent crime rate must go down. That is not true. The highest crime rates in 2012 were in the South, where gun ownership is at its highest. But this fact as well corroborates that any imposition of gun control does not address the issue of gun-related crime.

1 Maybe In A Perfect World . . .

Let us disentangle ourselves from the trees and take a look at the forest. Because there is no national gun registry, the exact number of guns in civilian hands in the US cannot be determined, but a conservative estimate places it-as of 2010, when the gun-buying craze was just reaching its peak-at 270 million weapons. This was about 89 guns per 100 people, the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. Yemen was second with 55 per 100, and Switzerland third. As of 2013, Serbia is second.

Another estimate, conducted by Congressional Research in 2012, places the total number of weapons in US civilian hands at 310 million as of 2009. By today, that means almost 1 gun for every single citizen, including infants. What would gun control even mean at this point? Assume this federal law: from 2014 on, no more assault rifles. Those who already own one may keep theirs, but such weapons will disappear from gun stores and pawn shops. Have we controlled much of anything? There are still at least 3 million assault rifles out there.

In a perfect world, gun control would mean going house to house throughout the nation and taking away every single firearm, including muzzle loaders. That would be impossible. Regardless of its constitutionality, gun owners would either fight back until there were a nationwide civil war or simply hide their weapons and claim they have none. Since most of those in the US are unregistered, no one knows who has what. Owners could always claim they destroyed those that are registered.

Thus, to debate gun control is a futile exercise. They cannot be controlled-not anymore. The continuation of buying and selling them cannot make the situation any worse because criminals will never again have to go far to find one.

FlameHorse is a writer for Listverse.

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10 Arguments Against Gun Control - Listverse

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This list serves as a rebuttal of the Listverse list " 10 Arguments for Gun Control " by Morris M. This list is not intended to incite controversy, but to foster an even-sided debate. The issue of gun control is global, but since it is most controversial in the United States of America, that nation is referred to most in the following entries.

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For Gun control

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There's no doubt about it-we sure do love our guns. Last year, the small arms survey concluded that the United States has 88.9 firearms for every one hundred people. That's more than Yemen, Mexico, Pakistan, and the West Bank/Gaza combined. Yet there's a heck-load of research out there indicating that a pinch of gun control would keep us safer, and potentially even save our lives. After all:

If you compared gun ownership levels with homicide rates, what would you expect to see? Fewer people willing to start a fight when everyone is armed? No correlation at all? Well, not exactly: according to decades of data analyzed by the Harvard School of Public Health, guns and homicides go together like Nicholas Cage and terrible movies.

Put simply, if your fellow citizens have easy access to guns, they're more likely to kill you than if they don't have access. Interestingly, this turned out to be true not just for the twenty-six developed countries analyzed, but on a State-to-State level too.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you definitely won't get shot in Massachusetts-just as it's entirely possible that you'll live ninety years in Arizona and never experience the slightest harassment. But statistically, the trend holds true. And on the subject of statistics...

There's a widespread perception that committing suicide is like planning a wedding or something; you sit down, give it a lot of thought, set a date, and get on with it. But study after study indicates that suicide is not so much a rational decision, but something people do on the spur of the moment-meaning that a lack of access to a death-shooting murder-stick at that critical moment could be the difference between life and death.

It might sound far-fetched, but look at the evidence: according to this report in the Boston Globe, States with high levels of gun ownership have a suicide rate almost twice as high as those with low ownership levels. Even more worrying, people who committed suicide were found to be seventeen times more likely to live with guns at home than not. Now, you might assume that gun owners or gun owning States are more likely to have mental health issues (for whatever reason), but research shows this isn't true. So you have a bunch of people exactly as miserable as people in other states, but anywhere between two and ten times more likely to end up "going the Heming-way."

For all the claims of politicians that they represent the public, the truth is that they basically don't. For every "Mr Smith Goes to Washington" type sticking up for the little guy, there are about two hundred others doing their best to trample him into the ground.

Case in point: at least fifty-four percent of Americans support very strict gun laws, with that number rising to a whopping ninety-one percent (LINK 6) when it comes to common-sense stuff like required background checks. You may recognize this as the same common-sense policy Congress recently shot down in what can only be assumed was an effort to become even more unpopular.

This support for gun control, by the way, is pretty bipartisan: even with controversial stuff like reinstating the assault weapons ban, roughly half of Republicans are in favor, along with a majority of Democrats and Independents. In other words, people are largely pro-gun control-it's the politicians who aren't.

Between 1982 and 2012, the US had roughly sixty-two mass shootings. That's an astonishing number-but it's not what I'm driving at. Instead, this research by Mother Jones (scroll down halfway) shows that, of those sixty-two shootings, forty-nine were perpetrated using legal weapons.

And guess what? Half of all mass shooters used assault weapons or high-capacity magazines-meaning that a few sensible restrictions could have saved a heck-load of lives. While someone really determined to pull off a massacre could do it using a handgun, shotgun or even a musket if they had to, they'd be pretty unlikely to kill anywhere near as many people as they would with, say, an AR-15 assault rifle. So putting controls on the assault rifle has to be a good thing, right?

Unlike Congress, the Australian Parliament likes action. In 1996, a mass shooter killed thirty-five people in Port Arthur in a massacre so pointlessly depressing I'm not going to mention a single other detail. Two weeks later, the conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, launched perhaps the most aggressive clamp-down on gun ownership in history.

Around 650,000 automatic and semi-automatic weapons were destroyed and a whole raft of checks and controls brought in. The end result? The first decade of the law alone saw a fifty-nine percent drop in Australian gun-homicides, while non-firearm-related homicides stayed level. In other words, people didn't switch to machetes or poison so much as they stopped killing altogether. As for mass shootings: well, Australia's gone all the way from eleven a decade (1986-96) to zero.

No other passage in the US Constitution is as hotly debated as the Second Amendment. In full, this controversial sentence reads:
"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Although most people focus on the "bear arms" part, the real key word is "militia." The thing is, in 1791, no-one really knew if this whole "Union" thing was going to work out. Many of the States distrusted each other, and everyone distrusted big government. The possibility of invasion was frighteningly real, and the Second Amendment was put in place to make sure that a citizen's militia could defend the principles of the constitution.

What the Second Amendment didn't do was grant any drunken asshole the right to stagger into a gun shop and buy an assault rifle without a single background check. In 1939, the Supreme Court even ruled that:

"The Second Amendment must be interpreted and applied with the view of its purpose of rendering effective Militia."

By 2008, they'd extended that to cover self-defense in the home-something else that doesn't require a high-capacity magazine and the ability to kill everything within a three block radius. But that's all they'd extended it to: there's no constitutional "right" to carry a concealed weapon, no "right" to use armor-piercing bullets-just the right to defend yourself against intruders. And as Stephen King famously said: "if you can't kill an intruder with ten rounds, you need to go back to the shooting range."

Let's be frank: very few of those who support gun control guys want an absolute, total ban on weapons. Personally, I think that if someone wants to buy a rifle and go hunting in the weekend, it's their business and has nothing to do with me. Equally, if you simply feel safer knowing that you have a shotgun in the house to defend your kids, fair enough.

But there's no conceivable reason to own an AR-15, a pump action shotgun, armor-piercing bullets or a high-capacity magazine. Firing a semi-auto at a piece of cardboard is no more "sport" than using a bazooka to play pool is "leisure." It simply appeals to the fraction of the population who dream of re-enacting Scarface's last stand, every time they get a letter from the IRS.

I mentioned in the introduction that the United States has more guns per capita than Yemen-but that doesn't even begin to describe our love of guns. According to data published in the the Guardian, gun ownership in the US is literally the highest in the world. Not in the "developed world," or the West; in the whole world. That makes Americans more heavily armed than Russians, Pakistanis and people from Afghanistan .

Even Latin American countries overrun by drug cartels, with murder rates comparable to war zones-such as Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala-have fewer guns per capita. Even literal war zones, like Somalia and D.R. Congo, have less heavy weaponry. When you feel more inclined to arm yourself than guys who live in a failed nation state where the average life expectancy is less than fifty years, it might be time to think about slowing down.

Of course, we could just as easily go in the opposite direction. If everyone was armed, no mass shooter would stand a chance, right? Not exactly. When Mother Jones crunched the numbers, they found that successful interventions by armed civilians had occurred in only 1.6 percent of all mass shootings since 1980. In other words, it happened a single time in thirty years.

In two other cases, armed civilians managed to subdue a killer after the shooting had already happened, which you could argue is still a good thing. But plenty of less-fortunate people who tried to get involved have only wound up adding to the casualty list. In 2005, for example, Brendan McKown and Mark Wilson both tried separately to confront an armed shooter. McKown was blasted into a coma, while Wilson was instantly killed.

The trouble is, you might be an ace down the range-but when you're in the middle of utter carnage, it's another thing altogether. That's why one of the few possibly successful interventions-at the end of the 2002 Appalachian School of Law shooting-came from an ex-cop. Training makes a hell of a difference.

The last big myth about owning enough firepower to rival Pablo Escobar is that it'll protect you when the government comes. It won't. A psychopathic Federal Government would have the entire US Army at its disposal, along with enough firepower to destroy the planet several times over. The best anyone making a "last stand" could hope for is to get out alive, instead of re-enacting the finale of the Waco Siege.

All that security assault weapons and their ilk might offer anyone is security of mind-which honestly doesn't seem worth it, stacked up against everything else on this list.

Morris is a freelance writer and newly-qualified teacher, still naively hoping to make a difference in his students' lives. You can send your helpful and less-than-helpful comments to his email, or visit some of the other websites that inexplicably hire him.

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10 Arguments for Gun Control - Listverse

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There's no doubt about it-we sure do love our guns. Last year, the small arms survey concluded that the United States has 88.9 firearms for every one hundred people. That's more than Yemen, Mexico, Pakistan, and the West Bank/Gaza combined.