Beyond TV, my understanding of US gun law stems entirely from the NG.

No wonder you're all worked up. Go to Google and type in 'Centers For Disease
Control' and 'FBI' and go look at the data, instead of fencing with anonymous
strangers on Usenet and watching reruns of Miami Vice.

I think my point was valid, and certainly not half-cocked. That statement
was in reply to the suggestion that, as is the right of any US citizen, a
criminal can legally carry a weapon.

Oh for Christ's sake.... (rolls eyes). That's not true. Felons cannot legally
own firearms (not that that prevents them. They're *felons*. Duh). At least not
in the great state of California, and I seriously doubt they can *anywhere.* You
are speaking from prejudice and your prejudice is based on ignorance, and if it
annoys you for me to point it out and call it by its proper name, I'm not
completely sorry. Because you've said a couple of things below that I find
seriously offensive.

It's the flagrant willingness to kill,

No, it's a total willingness to defend onesself in one's home. You used to have
the same ethos in your own society. You have successfully argued yourself out of
it, and only time will tell whether this was any sort of an improvement.

coupled with such a low regard for
the gravity of murder, that really gets me.

Prejudice again, and this one angers me. If I defend myself with lethal force,
it's only because I wish to avoid dying in my own living room. I have no desire
to harm any human being. No normal man does. I am not dehumanizing the violent
intrusive asshole who might hypothetically barge his way into my house at night.
I simply want to not be at his mercy. He's certainly not there to do me any
favors. The reason he might be armed is not because of any Yankee gun kul-chore,
but because criminals, by de facto goddam definition, DO NOT OBSERVE THE LAW.
This is true in London as well as Redding (CA, population 78,000). Why would any
reasonable individual place himself at the mercy of lawless, violent men?

What's the rate of hot burglaries in Britain? What's happened to your rates of
violent crime, gun crime, since you chopped every legally-owned handgun on your
island into scrap? They've gone up severalfold. Why? Because the lawless took
heart at the way their prospective victims were disarming themselves? No... no,
that's the standard macho NRA line, and I don't buy it. I think it's because
you've hit a rough demographic and economic patch, and banning legally owned
weapons -- predictably -- didn't make any dent in it. You treated a symptom. The
disease rages merrily onwards.

despit
our guns and drugs and widespread poverty and petty sleazy white-trash
meannesses that Shasta County is *still* safer than Merrie Olde England.

Controversial.

What's controversial about the facts? Unless you find them so counterintuitive
to your prejudices that you discard them out of hand.

You can say what you please in reply, but I see I'm not doing any good by
bouncing the marbles of statistical fact off the sidewalk of your prejudice. So
I'll stop.