[Kamehameha34]

A knife is designed to cut animal meat or veges. A car is designed to get you from point to point. Your shoes are designed to protect your feet. The baseball bat is designed to play baseball. A gun is designed to WOUND OR KILL OTHER PEOPLE. It's that part that you all need to realise. This places, at the very least, an unconscious label on it.

So? Who cares what it is designed for?

What matters is what it can do. A gun is designed to fire bullets. Punish people for making those bullets go through people.

Punishment for the ownership of an instrument is idiotic.

No, we restrict items based on thier ultimate purpose.

Objects don't have will.. They don't have "ultimate purposes"..

What gives them their purpose is the wielder.

So what is stopping people from building cruise missiles in thier own backyard? Maybe they built it so they could play target practice on thier uncles farm. Yet, the law stops them from assembling one. Your argument breaks down on it's foundations.

No - actually you just described a scenario and suggested that it somehow contradicted me without connecting any dots (which you'd have been unable to do anyway).

Cruise missiles have the potential to harm, but they can also cause significant harm to those in close proximity (neighbors, etc.). They can also be activated unwillfully, or accidentally.

If no one was in the blast range, there's no problem with it.

Guns FACILITATE intent, and ENCOURAGE thier own use by simply being present. Not to mention being many times more deadly than any other thing you can pick off the ground and club someone with.

So do baseball bats.

Guns are a means. That's all they facilitate. The fact that they are deadly means nothing without intent.

Criminals have criminal intent. Criminals go into jail. Problem solved.

Don't restrict my civil liberties because you can't think of a proper way to limit gun-related violence.

In the US, it is seen as a reasonable right to own and operate a firearm. In other countries, it ISN'T. Does that make other countries fascist pigs? You have already sacrificed a lot of your 'rights' by living under a government to begin with. So please don't act like the right to own a gun is essential, because it sure as hell isn't.

Nor is your right for the pursuit of happiness.

If you are unwilling to follow the constructs of the bill of rights, stay out of my country so those that are can live without endorsement of a nanny-state.

At any cost? The cost is what you AMERICANS call a god-given right.

No, it's a government-given right.

Once again, stay out of my country if you want to start impeding the fruition of my civil liberties.

You also have the highest murder rates in the world. I don't see that being the result of a good system. If it was such a good one, I don't see why the gun argument would have cropped up to begin with.

I said best, without impeding civil liberties.

I'm not going to slash off amendments to the constitution because of your lack of ingenuity in devising a proper limitation on gun-related crime.

And that would make sense if your crime rates were low. But they aren't.

DEATH BY MURDER

The USA is nowhere to be found on any of those international lists.

And even if they weren't low - yes, it still does make sense.