Steve writes:
Oh, well we don’t have longarms in the UK to protect our homes. Maybe farmers and a few hunters but not the vast majority of people. I think you need a license, and they wouldn’t give you one unless you went hunting or something like that. You can’t have them to protect your home…
Well I might let you have some sort of a rifle to protect your home. See, owning rifles doesn’t really up the homicide or crime rate all that much.
Reason? Longarms are inconvenient. They are simply too large for criminals to lug around with them all the time. Hence criminals tend to use small arms as they are easily concealed. Yes you can put a longarm in a vehicle and hide it that way, but then you have to bring it in from the vehicle to your residence and someone might see you.
Most gun accidents are with pistols, not rifles. Pistols are small and easy to pick up and mess around with in the home or backyard. Rifles are quite large and most people do not whip them out and play with them in the home.
Personally, my gun control priority would be pistols. There really is no need to own one. However, if you had a business in a high crime area and could prove you were at risk, I would let you have a pistol, but you would have to lock it up in the store when you were not there and you could not take it home. I would also ban all semi-automatic pistols as there is not need for such a thing.
I would permit all rifles with the exception of semi-automatic rifles which serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever. These are weapons of war not fit for peacetime. They are for soldiers and maybe SWAT teams and nobody else.
