There certainly was gun ownership before the gun 'ban' that was actually an extension of the existing restrictions - virtually a ban to be fair, though firearms are still used by farmers and hunters, and certain sportsmen in some capacities.
In recent times all kinds of large-capacity full-bore weapons could be owned for recreational purposes - including semi-auto 'assault' rifles and handguns. Way, way back there was no legislation at all, and it was common common for gentlemen - and not-so gentle men - to carry a revolver in Victorian times, for purposes of personal protection.
I'm certainly no authority on the citizen-history of firearms in the UK - I carried them on behalf of the government, so never needed or bothered to know further - but these 'recreational' weapons allowed in modern times were not to be carried on the person in public at any time, and had to be stored under stringent conditions that would have severely limited any home defence application - if the conditions were upheld to the letter of the law.
So even when firearms were legal, they were heavily regulated - and rarely featured in cases of self-defence to the best of my knowledge. You'd have to go back around a hundred years I reckon to compare our 'gun culture' to that of the US, when guns were commonplace. I would imagine that because the use of guns was so rare regarding crime, for and against, it really wasn't that much of a push to phase out the legally held firearms of a tiny minority.
In 1987, a human stain by the name of Michael Ryan used a Type-56 AK, M1 carbine and Beretta 92 - all legally held for recreational purposes - to murder 16 people and wound 15 others in his local town. After this the firearms laws were amended to prohibit semi-auto centrefire rifles, and repeater shotguns had to have the magazines crimped to restrict capacity to only two rounds.
There were no more active-shooter scenarios until in 1996 a piece of shit called Thomas Hamilton took two legally owned Browning pistols and two legally held S&W revolvers to a school and murdered 16 children aged between 5-6, and and adult teacher. Following this, laws were passed to restrict private gun ownership further - removing access to all 'cartridge ammunition' handguns except single shot .22 weapons used for target shooting. This was further amended to include these weapons, leaving only historical and muzzle loading handguns allowed.
This may well seem Draconion, but as many have already said - it's different over here to over there, and we had long grown away from being an armed culture so these laws affected a miniscule proportion of the country - who were not using guns for self/home-defence anyway, but for target shooting only.
To UK citizens it really was no big deal, still isn't, and there have been no further massacres using guns over here - it this really something to be criticised?
So Brian wasn't accurate with his 'no and no' response - but because the events are 'linear' and not 'parallel' in effect, it would be hard to compare crime now with crime then - everything has been on the rise, and the situations have changed so there can be no control group to base results upon. The facts remain however, that we used to have legally held firearms here, and we had a couple of serious massacres during this period. Since private gun ownership ceased - barring very exceptional circumstances - there have obviously been instances of crime involving guns, and people have been murdered with them - but not many, in fact a surprisingly small amount of people are killed with guns in the UK, including armed criminals by armed police, considering that we are at the mercy of gun-wielding thugs - or so the press would have the world believe.
Once more, in realistic terms it is a problem that the UK doesn't - yet - have, and therefore it's a solution that the UK doesn't - yet - need. What is there to criticise exactly?
Mick
