[laverya]

Even California and Hawaii don't ban hunting rifles. Same with Australia and the UK. Can you name a single country that totally bans the ownership of all firearms and enforces it? Would you like to live there?

(The rifle used isn't known yet, but only one shot was fired)

[FireBeyond]

Interesting choice of countries - as someone who was actually born in the UK, grew up in Australia, and now lives in the US, I have no idea what the relevance of those details has to what I said.

I merely remarked that someone else considered preventable gun deaths an acceptable cost to what he considered as sacrosanct. Well, tragic as his death is, I'm not the one who considered it an acceptable cost.

[laverya]

Australia and the UK are commonly used in the US gun control debate as places where gun confiscation worked, and CA/HI are the states with the most restrictive gun control policies.

My response was meant to illustrate that this was essentially not a "preventable gun death", or at least not preventable by any level of gun control ever implemented in a Western country. Similarly, the assassination of Shinzo Abe using a homemade pistol/blunderbuss was not a preventable gun death.

[defrost]

> where gun confiscation worked

Australia now has more guns per capita than it did prior to the national unification of gun laws.

Unwanted guns, guns no one was willing to license, and guns not acceptable for licensing were bought back for cash, filling skip bins full of guns - much publicized as confiscation in the US.

Australian gun control was about regulation - every legal gun registered and tracked, every gun sale logged, twelve year olds joining gun clubs only with qualified supervision and unable to purchase and own a gun until adulthood.

Gun regulation following the Port Arthur massacre, the largest mass shooting in the world at that time, changed relatively little in West Australia at that time - what did happen was that regulation in Queensland, in Tasmania, and the Northern Territory and the ACT were all bought in line with with the major states of Australia for a uniform nation wide code.

I'm in rural Australia, I have firearms, my close neighbour target shoots at 5,000 yards (not a typo - 24 inch steel targets at five thousand yards - longer than any confirmed sniper shot as he and his partner are ULR (ultra long range) fanatics .. and good at it).

What regulation in Australia has achieved is a near elimination of mass shooting events, since Port Arthur there have been fewer than fingers on hand such events in 25+ years total - ie fewer mass shooting than occur in five days in the USofA.

It's also made guns extremely difficult to access for village idiots, the stupidly violent, petty criminals, etc.

Unregistered guns are on the rise in Australia being smuggled in and used by criminal enterprises with not stupid ex military enforcers, ghost guns are about, etc.

Having strong regulation makes for more open ground and an easier time of it cracking down on criminal use of guns.

It hasn't eliminated assassination by gunshot, but such events are relatively rare in Australia.

[twixfel]

OK but these assassinations an assassination attempts are happening in the US, not the UK.

[laverya]

Agreed, but the difference in the use of rifles in assassination attempts between the US and UK/EU/AUS/etc can't purely be because of a lack of gun control in the US if the same rifles are available in those other countries too. (semiautomatic military style rifles like used in the first attempt on Trump are almost always more restricted overseas, but again this was only a single shot and could easily have been from a bolt-action rifle)

[twixfel]

That's not the whole story though. Whatever weapons are available in the UK, they're far harder to obtain than in the US. It's a mixture of both of these issues. Whenever I visit the USA, what always strikes me quite quickly, is just how many mentally ill people there are literally everywhere just roaming the streets, and how the non-mentally-ill people deal with them. I've only had my life threatened once in my life, and that was when a homeless man threatened to kill me in New York. No big deal in the USA, happens all the time, but quite difficult to understand how you guys accept this "way of life" and just let it be and choose to do nothing about it at all.