The reason that the gun laws are more restrictive in those parts of the country is because they've realised what a huge problem they represent. The stats certainly do speak for themselves but you have to look at the right stats.

For almost all areas, when making international comparisons the USA is compared to other 'similar' countries normally meaning Western Europe, Canada, Japan Australia and so on. In other words the 'Western World'. These are countries with similar levels of education, democracy freedom and wealth.

For many areas the USA compares impressively well but there is a glaring discrepancy when it comes to prison population and gun crime. The two are obviously linked but I'll ignore the prison population since we are talking about guns.

Look at this chart and tell me that guns are making you safer.

I also notice that you start talking about 'accidental' gun deaths for children. I didn't mention 'accidental' deaths I just stated the plain truth that thousands of children are being injured or killed by guns in your country every year. I suppose if they are not accidents you don't care?

I think possibly because the USA is a relativley new country it doesn't place as much emphasis on history teaching as older countries do. Certainly you appear to be pretty uninformed.

Hitler's regime did not disarm the German people, like all European countries the vast majority of people in Germany were never armed, certainly not in the 20th century and certainly never with guns. The regime was very popular and won power through the ballot box and through propaganda.

The majority of Germans never saw themselves as being oppressed, you do not know what you are talking about.

The same argument goes for Stalin's Russia. The people were not disarmed. You are simply incorrect.

Bringing Cambodia into your argument is pretty desperate but again the population of Cambodia had no history of being armed. The truly unfortunate events that took place in that country were a tragic combination of colonial withdrawal and cold war power play. You can lay the blame at France, Russia and the USA but to suggest that the problem was that the peasants didn't have guns is ridiculous.

You are blind to the harm guns cause in your country because you like guns.

The argument that you need them to keep the government at bay is unbelievably weak and does not justify those dead or maimed children that you ignore, or the large number of suicides that wouldn't happen if guns did not make it so easy.

Iraq had plenty of guns and your government and mine had little trouble taking over. The idea that people with pistols or rifles are going to make any difference to the US military is laughable.

By the way boats have plenty of good uses. Tell me what use a .55 Magnum has.

But by any measure, carrying a gun puts you and those around you at more risk not less.

Do you realise how many kids are hurt by guns in your country?

Imagine if there was a tasty food that injured 15,000 kids every year. You think anyone would be allowed to sell it because it didn't hurt the majority of people and people really liked it?

What about the 15,000 children injured by guns each year in the US? I've no idea how to find out the rate in England in 2010, I suspect it would be near zero.

Your arguing that most deliberate acts are done by criminals, and I'm sure you are right, but you have a missive amount of accidental injury and death because of the proliferation of legal guns, don't they figure in your calculations or thoughts?

Having guns around also makes suicide much easier and as a result your suicide rate is far higher than it would be without guns. Again does this ever enter into your calculations?

People argue as if the 2nd Amendment is the end of the matter but you can change the constitution you just need to persuade enough people that it's for their own good.

Thanks for the reply.

I believe the main difference between us is that I see my freedom as being protected by giving the exclusive right to bear arms to the govrrnment of the day.

Allowing anuone else access to weapons refuces my freedom to live my life peacefully.

You obvously see the government as a pitential threat rather than an ally.

I can certainly appreciate your point of view but it seems a bit too hypothetical to justigy the actual rwal harm that guns clearly do in your society. How do you measure the huge number of children killed against you supposed increase in freedom for exsmple? Clearly if 50% of kids were beong shot you wouldn't tolerate it so somewhere between your current level, which seems amazingly high to the rest of the world, and that 50% there is a point where you'd give up guns. Where do you yhink thst figure lies?

Bombs and grenades are illegal though. Are you saying that self aiming guns should therefore be illegal?

As a English man who cannot really understand the arguments in favour of the 2nd Amendment can I ask a few questions to my gun loving cousins?

Where do you draw the line between what is and isn't a firearm?

Does the 2nd Amendment allow (in your mind at least) a citizen to have a rocket launcher or a laser gun?

What are you going to do when the technology of simple side arms develops to the point where you an take out a room full of people by pressing a trigger and letting you gun do all the aiming etc..?

Would genuinely like to hear from a pro gun NRA type.

OK you've convinced me now. I didn't realise there where 'shitloads' of planets out there. I'm an idiot and so are all of the scientists who have given serious thought to this matter.

Have you heard of Paul Davies or SETI or Francis Crick?

I, like most people who have thought about it think that life elsewhere is pretty damn likely, truly intelligent life much less so but still likely, but no one who has thought about the arguments ('there are shitloads of planets' isn't the only argument) would ever claim that 'it cannot possibly be that we are the only life' as you state.

The creation of life appears to have only happened on Earth once (there seems to be only one tree of life), and it seems to have taken several hundred million years. That suggests that even when conditions are right, as they obviously are here, it is pretty hard to get going.

The 'there are shitloads of planets' argunment could just as easily be applied to the question of intelligent life elsewhere and yet Drake's equation and Fermi's paradox both point to the flaws in such simplistic reasoning.

You made an overblown statement and were called out on it, not just by me, and now you won't admit you were wrong.

Is life elsewhere likely? I think so. Is it possible Earth houses the only life? Absolutely. Read Davies' book, it's very good.

I'm not saying that there isn't life elsewhere I'm just pointing out your ridiculous statement that it cannot even be possible that there isn't life out there.

The universe is big but as far as we know it isn't infinite. Multiplying the probablilities of lots of unlikely events quickly gets makes things very very unlikely.

Francis Crick once wrote 'The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle so many are the conditions require to get it going'.

Paul Davies who I believe heads up SETI has written a whole book about this question and having read it I can tell you that he is far from convinced that there is any life elsewhere.

At least one investigation concluded that the bombing was a deliberate attack to try and stop Stealth Fighter technology being passed back to China.

Can you back up your confident assertion that it was a mistake?

Amazing logic there. Most people who have given it serious consideration think it is perfectly possible that Earth has the only life in the universe.

I have a Note and can vouch for the fact that you need two hands even to answer a call.

I don't care though as I rarely make calls so the bigger screen more than makes up for needing two hands. It also just fits in my trouser pocket, any bigger and it wouldn't.

Not sure what you mean by

If you mean you can't use it while you are driving, then I'd say that was a good thing.

Don't mean to be rude but you'd have to have had a pretty poor history education to not know about the Storming of the Bastille.

The French Revolution is one of the key points in world history, if you don't know anything about it you're not going to understand an awful lot of references in the culture around you.

In England we have free healthcare for everyone.

It's very popular.

The media in the US says that we have death panels.

We don't have death panels. They were lying to you.

Completely agree.

The USA is possibly the only country in the world where more men are raped than women.

The threat of rape helps force innocent people to take a plea bargain. Plea bargaining being another outrage that the USA blindly accepts but which most civilised countries severely limit.

Why not use a gun to fire fuel to a rocket then?

If you fired the gun every few seconds you wouldn't have the expense of lifting all of the fuel right from the start.

You'd just need the rocket to have some way of catching the fuel. Bit tricky admittedly.