(21 Aug 14, 08:17PM)Nightmare Wrote: Not sure where all this came from, since I wanted to talk about how the UK is Hunger Games 2.0 for not allowing pocket knives.
In the link you provided yourself, we're the eighth lowest out of seventy-five countries. Don't criticise our system when your own statistics prove it's superior in effect to yours.
About your previous point to do with gangs - they are present here too in some lower class boroughs of London (probably in most countries too actually). Stabbings and shootings in areas where gangs operate are not really "common" in the UK, but they do happen and probably contribute significantly to the amount of gun/knife-related deaths in our country.
It's pretty much never heard of to read about a policeman shooting a man dead just because he's wielding a gun, in fact most police officers in the UK are not even armed (sometimes they carry tazers and that's it, but no guns unless it's a very special case). Similarly, we never hear about teenage maniacs driving around shooting people out of their car windows, and we never hear about school shootings (the latter of which is worryingly common in the US).
According to ABC News (american news service so it's not part of some america-hating organisation), there are 88 guns per 100 people and 10 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people in the US. Out of the twenty-seven developed countries that ABC News studied, America was the worst for both gun possession and gun-related deaths. In stark contrast, Japan had only 0.6 guns per 100 people and 0.06 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people.
So don't bother trying to convince me that guns are a good thing, or that you can justify the public being allowed to have one. The only counter-argument you've put up is that you need to use a pocket knife for your work and then you condemn the UK for not allowing people to carry knives around in public, which is completely irrelevant to the previous discussion. And then you say "not sure where all this came from" - you derailed your own topic. There is a clear correlation between the amount of guns owned by the public in a certain country and the gun-related deaths in a certain country.
Regardless of whether or not it's homicide, it's still a death that was caused by a gun and could have been prevented if you removed the gun from the equation. There isn't any justification for using a gun to take a life, and the boundaries for what counts as "self defense" are repeatedly being (ab)used as an excuse to encompass borderline criminal activity.
The only part of your post I agree with is that it's "too late in the game to do anything anyway". You're correct when you say a full gun ban wouldn't stop the most determined gun owners or the amount of gun-related deaths, but that's because your country has perpetuated a culture that sees the use of guns as acceptable. And that just highlights how fucked up of a country America really is.