Not guilty

The tragedy in Cumbria has sparked off the usual debate on the MSM and the blogosphere about gun control. There have been the usual calls for a complete tightening up of guns despite the UK having some of the most stringent gun control laws in the world to people like me who believe that it is the stringent controls that have put most guns into the hands of criminals, lunatics and the police.
Now I'm not saying that situations like Derrick Bird wont ever arise, fact is that despite our strict controls he was able to get guns and use them and I doubt any stricter legislation would have prevented this from happening. I've used guns since I was a teenager, from air rifles/pistols, through to shot guns and strangely enough haven't shot anyone yet, nor do I have any intentions of doing so. What I do with the guns I own are target shooting and clay pigeon shooting and the shotgun I use for the clay pigeons is kept at the gun club and not in my house. I do have 2 air rifles here which I use for target practice, again though I've never shot anyone with them other than vermin. I'm not unique in this either, my brother in law is also part of the hunting and shooting brigade, save he hunts animals for food and whilst he's an ex red cap I'm fairly sure he and his mates haven't shot anyone since leaving the services, though possibly they did whilst serving.

Thing is making it tougher to own a gun only works with honest people and it's not like you can uninvent them either. So by banning access to guns all you do is spoil people's enjoyment, people who never have and never will be a danger to the general public. It will also move guns into the hands of the criminal element, even more so than it has now, though anyone in the know can get a handgun if they really want one. Besides, as our "friends" in the religion of peace have shown us, you don't need guns to kill people, a bag of fertilizer and some glycol-ether based fluid is enough to give you quite a boom for your buck. Oh yes and banning knives has worked so well too.
Banning never works, all it does is either force the ban of choice into the hands of the criminal element or makes the general public criminals. Much as I'm for the relaxing of gun laws in the UK, I'm also aware of the culture we have here, a gradual relaxing coupled with social change might be enough, but whichever way we go, you'll still get people like Derrick Bird, if it wasn't a gun it would be something else because in all of us there's a switch from normal to insane, the circumstances are just different for us all.