and anon @7:39– stop channeling the NRA and perhaps use some actual facts instead of pulling arguments out of your a**. there is no universal machine gun ownership by all “military-age” (what age would that be?) males in Switzerland. Active duty Swiss army personnel are required to keep their weapons at home UNDER LOCK AND KEY, and they make up less than 13% of the Swiss households. see http://www.guninformation.org/. as for Canada, the per capita firearm ownership is roughly less than 2/3 that of the US (48% vs. 29%) and per capita handgun ownership is significantly less (29% to 5%).

there’s a lot that plays into america’s violent crime rates, but the number of guns lying around every other household in the US ratchets up the problem exponentially.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that there are qualitative differences between the average Swiss guy and the average American, and it’s those qualitative differences that account for the difference in crime rates between the two countries, not the mere availability of guns.

Let’s address those root causes of our criminal class (e.g. dysfunctional parents, terrible education, abysmal nutrition, counterproductive role models, Prohibition-era drug laws, etc, etc, etc) rather than asking honest citizens to unilaterally disarm.

yes, to all of those questions. whether the local US Attorney’s office or the DC AG chose to prosecute them is a matter of enforcement discretion, but if they did what they have said they did (or it is alleged they did) it was a crime.

if you looked behind the gun death statistics in this country, you’d know that a majority of the gun deaths in this country are perpetrated by “non-violent people” with guns who end up killing someone–someone who was not robbing, raping or assaulting them– or themselves. someone gets pissed off, loses their temper, or gets depressed, and the availability of guns, the inherent distance a gun provides, and the irreversible consequences result in someone taking a life when, absent the gun, the worst result would have likely been a black eye or bloody nose. if you’ve ever hit another person, you know that the punch sends a message back to the puncher–it’s visceral, you feel what you are doing. the same is even true of a knife or a baseball bat–you have to physically touch your victim, and it hurts you as well as your victim. with a gun, you can stand 5, 10, 20 feet away, point it, and pull the trigger. it’s done, and you don’t have to physically feel anything at all.

so in the rest of the civilized world, when people fly off out of anger or hate, immediate, detached deadly force isn’t available in most cases, and the senses intervene to minimize the actions of otherwise rational, normally non-violent people. in the US, where there’s a gun in every other house, we see the results in violent death statistics.