Respect your views and enjoy your postings, but may I disagree from over in
the UK?

Actually Britain isn't quite so gun-free as you might imagine. Quite a few
of my acquaintances still have, or have owned, shotguns, and just about
every farmer has one (invariably single or double barrelled: pump action was
always rather frowned upon whether you were shooting birds or clays, even
before they were banned). But of course a nutter with such a weapon can't
cause quite the mayhem of the Hungerford / Dunblane / Cumbria guys.

I'm not so worried about drug dealers shooting each other, although
obviously bystanders occasionally get caught up in it, which is a tragedy.

In the US, most if not all police are armed and presumably most of them are
well trained and pretty familiar with firearms. How often do they get shot?
In the UK, very few police carry. Over the decades since WW2, the number of
firearms in circulation in the criminal and marginal communities have
declined, and police victims have declined accordingly. These days, even a
wounded policeman is national news in the UK, and I think it is probably a
few years since a policeman was shot to death. The more guns, the more
victims.

To my mind, the right to carry is more of a threat than a protection. I
don't doubt that experienced, serious, and responsible gun owners can be
trusted: there's no-one I would rather have next to me in a tight spot than
Gunner. But everyone doesn't meet the same standards: some would be a
downright liability, and a minute proportion may "crack". You have more of
these cases than we do, and if we tightened up further, we would have fewer
than we have now.

But, like Voltaire said, freedom of expression is really the thing which
should be cherished.