The suicide and accident arguments do little to justify the gun grabbers, around the world people commit suicide in many ways apart from guns. A gun may be faster and perhaps in the eye of the person ending their time, more dramatic but the person who jumps off a cliff is just as dead, so is the slit wrists, jumping under a truck or people who hang themselves. Then there are those who overdose on pills or drugs, those who poison themselves and the list goes on forever.
Now with accidents, people have accidents all the time, car prangs is one of them, running over pedestrians, falling off ladders etc etc etc ad infinitem. The gun culture in the US is based on its history, a colony turned into a nation that had its own war of independence, civil war, indian wars, frontier towns, fights over land grabs and a whole host of other things that involved people shooting at each other. Interestingly enough the history in OZ is different, it retained the English legal structure and political system, we have never had internal warfare and while guns are part of our culture, they were mainly for hunting or killing feral animals.
I can go some of the way with Bill in that concealable weapons are mainly used for killing people, same with any rapid fire weapon (I mean, do you hunt rabbits with an Uzzi ?) but we would disagree about autoloader assault rifles as long as they were not concealable.
There is another factor with gun grabbing, it changes the types of weapons available to people who WILL illegally own and use weapons. In a society that allows at least some gun ownership, most illegal usage will be similar weapons but perform blanket bans on gun ownership and the range of weapons illegally brought into the country changes, RPGs, grenade launchers, a whole host of concealable machine guns, rapid fire hand guns, specialised weapons that are truly silent, crossbows, pneumatic propulsion guns (air rifles and pistols [and I don't mean the BB guns that kids used to play with] ).
The problem will not go away by disarming the people who do things legally, it will simple make it easier for people who do not play by the rules. I mean, does anyone seriously thing that an Al Queda terrorist cell give a flying PHUK about legality ?
