I was reading the posts in this new thread, and came across Zacks. In the things he said he enjoyed, he mentioned firearms.

I want to say clearly and unequivocally that I abhor firearms, and people who enjoy them, love them, whatever they justify it with scare me. IMO there is no justification for unlimited access to firearms in a civilised society (nor capital punishment, but that's another argument).

I know all the arguments for guns, self-defence (must be better to shoot someone that to let them steal your DVD player mustn't it!), it is the people who kill not the guns, etc. etc. A gun owning society has a different ethos than a non-gun society, and so ipso facto the people change and are more likely to use them.

In the West Wing series 2, the Third State of the Union Address episode, Toby is taking part in a TV debate analysis, and there is some Republican arguing that the White House uses the First Amendment to allow all sorts of perversions yet wants to introduce gun control. Toby makes that point that the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and AUstralia is roughly equivalent to that of the United States but in the previous year there were 112 gun deaths in those conutries, 32,000 in the US.

So, are Americans more homicidally inclined, or does gun ownership change social norms, or even rip the social fabric?