[stephen_g]

I'm Australian too, and it seems to work pretty well. One thing I hear a lot is that 'then only the bad guys will have guns', but I think our laws and enforcement must drive the black-market prices way up, because they do find illegal guns every now and then when they have a big drug bust and confiscate millions of dollars of drugs and cash, but your regular criminal on the street pretty much never has a gun. The drug gangs mostly only shoot each other, and pretty rarely too, so for the average Australian, the idea of ever witnessing gun violence (or being a victim to it) just feels really far fetched.

I wonder how much of it is cultural though - when the big gun buyback happened after Port Arthur, it was mostly taking guns from farmers - not people who think they could rise up against the Government or that they should be able to personally kill people in self-defense...

[brbsix]

Since when is it a contentious issue to kill in legitimate self-defense, with a firearm or not?

[stephen_g]

It's just not something you really ever hear about anyone doing here, and even when it is required, it's pretty far down the list of things to do. Pretty much the only time you hear about someone killing someone in self defense is a cop killing a knife-weilding person every now and then...

Whereas in the US every now and then you hear about people firing at what they think is an intruder, but it turns out to be a family member and stuff like that. It's just really strange to me that shooting would be the first thing you would do, but from the news we hear, it seems that's what a non-insignificant number of people in the US do.

[TylerE]

It does kinda help to be, you know, an island.