Reply #346: That's not the point.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

Guns, many of them initially held in the hands of civilians, helped win the America War of Independence and American Civil War, and guns held in the hands of civilians have never started a war in America, so what you say is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't prove anything.

The reason I and many other people would like to see stricter gun control laws in America is nothing to do with warfare, its because of the large number of people killed by them accidentally and deliberately in peacetime.

Nowadays America's military might is so overwhelming that the American army doesn't *need* the support of an armed militia, and that will only become more the case as time goes on and the advance of techology makes military might dependent more and more on money and science rather than manpower.

For reference, I'm believe that any decent gun-control in America would be unconstitutional unless you second ammendment were repealed, and that that will not, alas, happen in the forseeable future, and that trying to introduce even semi-decent gun control, especially on a federal level, would be electoral suicide for the Democrats, so I don't think they should try and do it. I do think that America would be a better place to live with gun control on about the level we have here in the UK, though,