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Originally Posted by Armistead
Not sure of your question, but gun ownership was never a legal right given by the 2nd amend. As I said earlier, you saw no congressman in the 1700's shouting he was gonna pass a law to make guns legal. The crowd would've yelled "since when were they illegal" It has been a natural common law right since guns were invented. You guys across the seas gave away your gun rights when you defined gun rights as legal rights, thus giving your govts the right to make them illegal. Gun right advocates in America see the right to hunt for food and self defense a natural common right. The 2nd amend doesn't deny the natural right of gun ownership, just extends it's use in regards to militia use...
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Yes but the right is not without limit, that's sort of what I was aiming at, for example you can't purchase armour-piercing ammunition or explosive rounds (at least according to wikipedia you can't), so perhaps introduce a law that...I don't know, maybe that any gun owner has to attend a gun safety class every six months or risk a fine and/or imprisonment? Something like that, to encourage people to actually use firearm safety so that their mentally unstable teenager is not able to access their firearm and use it on a rampage. That would perhaps be a start.
By the way, in regards to weapons ownership, the 2nd Amendment is in fact based on the English Bill of Rights of 1689:
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Whereas the late King James the Second by the Assistance of diverse evill Councellors Judges and Ministers imployed by him did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant Religion and the Lawes and Liberties of this Kingdome (list of grievances including) ... by causing severall good Subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when Papists were both Armed and Imployed contrary to Law, (Recital regarding the change of monarch) ... thereupon the said Lords Spirituall and Temporall and Commons pursuant to their respective Letters and Elections being now assembled in a full and free Representative of this Nation takeing into their most serious Consideration the best meanes for attaining the Ends aforesaid Doe in the first place (as their Auncestors in like Case have usually done) for the Vindicating and Asserting their ancient Rights and Liberties, Declare (list of rights including) ... That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law.
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However, after the Jacobite rebellions in the 1700s, harsh disarming laws were imposed on Scotland and the in the early 1800s, further firearms laws were put in place because of returning soldiers from the Napoleonic wars were becoming a nuisance in the countryside by using their firearms for banditry. Then again after the First World War, further legislation was brought in to control the amount of firearms being brought back from the war, and then after that laws were generally (except for the 1968 Firearms Act) only brought in after incidents such as Hungerford and Dunblane.
Has it worked? Well the number of mass shooting sprees has been pretty low, just two in my lifetime (Dunblame and the Cumbria sprees) but gun crime has been fairly fluctuating but generally a lot lower than in comparison to the US, even if you scale the populations to equal measure.
Now
knives, that's a different story.
