Anyway, in case you had forgotten, the sentence in the constitution relating to bearing arms also refers to a "well-regulated militia", so it isn't unconstitutional to regulate gun ownership.

On the other hand, if you've been unable to prevent the gun being stolen, it's not really working as self-defence, is it?

Here the plates don't usually change when the car changes hands.

Welcome to Slashdot. I can see from your number you've been here for some time, but when you immigrate, you should always try to integrate into the host society. RTFA? You are insulting my culture.

"fookin"?!? Is that supposed to be a Scottish accent? You're a couple of hundred miles out, mate. Ignorance and bigotry are such common bedfellows...

He meant to use "dissenting". (which isn't actually the right word either -- read "differing" or "opposing")

If you argue that gun control requires an amendment to be truly legal that's one thing, but the constitution is not some immutable natural law, and can and should be amended whenever it diesn't serve society's needs. The right to bear arms is about civil defense, and handheld firearms don't offer any real protection against a hostile military. So are you going to rip up the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and allow Donald Trump to build his own flotilla of nuclear submarines? If not, then the role of an armed citizenry needs to be revisited. Even if re-examination results in an affirmation of the right to carry, that process still needs to be followed.

That's a subjective statement. The Columbine shooters took half their weapons from the legally-owned stash of one of their fathers, and the other half were bought on the black market, and the argument is that they would have just bought more if they hadn't had access to Dad's guns. This may be true. Some claim that te presence of guns at home somehow "normalised" the idea of having guns, and that they wouldn't have gone and bought them. This may be true, but seems to be a pretty thin argument. The real crux of the argument, though, is the effect of supply, demand and risk on price. Illegal firearms are extremely cheap in the US as they're much easier to get hold of and easier to transport, due to the number of legal arms around. In the UK, there are very few legal guns in circulation, so the cheapest source of illegal firearms is unavailable (I refer, of course, to those obtained by burglary and mugging). Prices are so different over here that e Columbine shooters would have been able to afford one at most... but then he gun market is so specialised and paranoid that they probably would never have found anyone to sell to them.

I never really understood the second-hand argument. If I buy a car in the UK, it gets registered in my name on the national database. I'm allowed to lend it to my friends, but if there's an incident involving the vehicle and the vehicle leaves the scene, I will be the police's first point of call. In fact, unless I can prove who was driving at the time, I'm responsible. It seems slightly onerous, but it's all part and parcel of a trust relationship -- only lend your car to someone you trust. The same principle should surely apply with guns. If I sell my car, I have a legal requirement to ensure that the national registry is updated with the current owner's details. This not only makes sure that the correct person is prosecuted in the case of serious accidents, but it also makes it harder to fence stolen vehicles or to claim ignorance if caught trading stolen vehicles. I can't see why anyone would object to a similar system for firearms, which are far more co,parable to cars than to hammers in their ability to cause accidental harm or to be used in deliberate criminal acts.

If you make security one of the determiners of "fit to own firearms", you tend to get fewer fake thefts. Having your gun stolen is not a pleasant experience in places with such laws.

Who was it that told us to beat our swords into ploughshares again...?

Are you also in favour of removing the need for a driving license on public roads? People can have their licenses refused or removed on medical grounds if their condition makes them dangerous on the road (eg narcoleptics and epileptics, and that's not considered "pre-crime". Not putting a gun in the hands of a paranoid schizophrenic isn't "pre-crime" either, just good sense.

The problem is that it wasn't loose enough. Previous Greek governments were borrowing off the back of the Euro as though it were a national currency and using it to shore up the public finances rather than cracking down on tax dodges (and given that the ministers were all dodging taxes themselves, what else could you expect? In principle, I'm all for the Euro, but it was established without the appropriate checks and balances, and Greece is a result of that.

But a developer not working in Greece won't make money for anyone, hence why they're all migrating to countries where there are jobs.

Not just a US problem. Edinburgh has a massive call centre outsourcer. Now we all know that call centres pay peanuts, because they don't really need skilled workers, but this one does, because it's a multilingual call centre. All of their staff are fluent in two, three or even four or more languages. They get about £500 more than the usual unskilled phone jockey per year, despite the huge efficiency savings made by not having to have individual call handlers on hand for each language even at slow times. And people say this is OK because of supply and demand.