I’d like to be pretty much diametrically opposed to you about this, because we don’t have any guns, and we don’t have any shootings either here in the UK. And don’t think that guns guarantee freedom from oppression.

BUT, the UK government banned legally owned sports handguns 10 years ago after one of the only incidents, when a guy burst into a school with a gun. They were small calibre target shooting guns - you couldn’t buy any other kind here - which were mostly kept at the very few gun clubs. And since the ban, most of the handguns that there were (not many, not by your standards) went into the black market. And gun crime started to rise. Criminals started carrying guns for protection from other criminals, when nobody was armed before. Now there are shootings among gangs and particularly in poor black communities. 11,000 gun crimes in 2005/6 compared to 6,000 10 years before (many of which involved replicas used just to scare people in robberies). And now they’re talking about arming the police. So we’ll have police with guns. Great. All because of some crappy kneejerk legislation banning guns unnecessarily.

If America banned guns, it’d create a black market unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’d be a disaster.

Personally, I wish you’d never had the 2nd amendment in the first place, so that you wouldn’t have the 25-30,000 gun homicides a year (10,000+ of which are not suicide, i think) compared to, um, 90 or so total gun-related homicides in the UK last year (15 in London. 15.) Your population is 5 times bigger than ours, and we are much denser, but you have 300 times the number of gun homicides. And it’s not like we’re finding other more inventive ways of killing ourselves
But anyway, it’s too late to close the box now.

On the plus side, though, the fact that you have guns means that your films are a lot more exciting than ours. As demonstrated by Raquel.

But you have to admit, the gun helps.”

-Eddie Izzard

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”