Grobut, I have to say I'm much closer to fully agreeing with you than I was after your first posts, I guess.
Look, whenever I said something about limiting/banning guns it was, as I've already mentioned, a short-hand for severely limiting their availability. Perhaps different countries need different levels of restrictiveness, but here in the European Union I think it should be pretty much the same everywhere, since we're in the Schengen zone now and as it's been pointed out earlier, limited area gun-free zones simply don't work.
The problem in this case is that Finland has extremely lax gun laws, too lax for my tastes, i'm not a gun-phobic, but neither do i want just anyone having access to them.
Couple that with the woefully inadequate handeling of mental health care that is prelevalent just about anywhere, and you have a situation where a disaster like this can happen (though to be fair, it can also happen here in Denmark despite our much stricter laws, there is a black market).
But if you look at Europe as a whole, where most countries do require licenses and training, we dont really have a big problem here, legally owned firearms are very rarely used in crimes, and when they are, its more along the lines of a jaleous husband shooting the wife for sleeping around, and honestly, the gun was not the deciding factor in such a homicide, there's many other ways it could be done without a firearm, and indeed it often is, but it only makes the news if a gun was used.
Usually what we see are illegal firearms involved in crimes, most notably amongst rival gangs or other criminal orginizations, or for stuff like bank robberies, though you will at times also see someone shot by an illegal firearm at a bar fight or so, but the vast vast majority of gun crimes comitted in Europe are done by allready banned, or illegally owned firearms, and even thease are few and far between.
Its a tempest in a teapot, we dont have a huge problem, guns are not readilly avalible, and when something actually does happen, its a safe bet it was an illegal weapon that was involved.
Hell we have a gang war going on in Denmark right now, between the Hells Angels and Immigrant gangs over the drug market, guns are beeing used, yes, but what guns are they? stuff like AK's and even RPG's, weapons that have never ever been legal in this country and should never have been here, at no time has there been a legal import of thease items, so, honestly, what amount of legislation would have stopped that? none, better security at our harbours might have stopped the illegal weapons getting here, in other words, better enforcement of the law, but its allready extremely illegal.
And with regards to spree killers and the like, yeah you can prevent them from legally owning a firearm, but as we've seen, you can't prevent them from obtaining one ilegally, if some dumbass who wants to hold up a postal office can get one, so can Psycho Dude, so the logical thing to do is attack his desire to commit the crime, tratment, remove his desire to kill and you've won, it makes an awfull lot of sense really.
Also, if you want to shoot a paper target, doing so with a real gun sounds like overkill. Sure, it must be fun, but you could just as well use an airgun or an airsoft gun. It's still fun, I know I tried (haven't tried real guns, so perhaps it's not for me to say).
Well to be frank, you can also race around a track on a Go-Cart, and thats fun, but its a little funner doing it in a V12 Ferrari, though owning a beast of a car like that is a risk.
Hopefully you see where im going with that, there's a difference between shooting an airrifle at targets 20 meters away (they are just not long distance weapons) and shooting a rifle at targets 150 meters away, there's a whole different level of skill and thrill involved.
I've tried it, i know a few people who are licensed and members at a range, and i've owned (and still do) both Airsoft and airrifles myself, its not the same thing.
Anyway, as i said the goal should be preventing that guns fall in the wrong hands, it should not be to create some Nanny society where things that have an inherent risk are banned, that'd be horrible.
And really, people who are fearfull of a licensed owner who shoots at a range just because he owns a firearm are just plain ignorant, gun-phobic really, personally i'm much more worried about drunken retards who walk around with knifes, take way too many 'roids and meth and enjoy saying the phrases "You think youre tough huh?" and "What are you staring at!?", thouse are the people you need to stay clear of...
And I agree with you as well on the additional money you could keep in your pocket or spend on making the healthcare system this one bit better. Deffo people need the money more than your pocket does.
We probably agree on quite a lot, infact if we sat down face to face and had us some cold EB's i think we could have an excellent talk about it all, but its a bit trickier over the net.
I think where we disagree is in the amounts, how much is too much and how little is too little and such
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