I don't hear many (if any) people in the UK calling for the gun laws to be relaxed....
Actually there has been, the British Olympic Association, the Shooters Rights Association to name but two.
I remember clearly the front page of the Sun newspaper, there was a bloke in cammo, with a balaclava, an AK47, a Beretta and a belt of GPMG ammunition around his neck. They forgot to mention that the GPMG belt ammunition does not fit a 7.62x39 AK47
PISTOL shooters can recall precisely where they were and what they were doing when the first news bulletins came through of the Dunblane massacre on March 13, 1996. They went through phases of shock and horror, then bafflement, then rage. Rage that a man with a gun licence - one of their own - could have shot dead 16 children and their teacher.
Then the mood changed and competitive shooters, many of them reliable winners of medals for Britain in international meetings, found they were the target of (typical) tabloid newspaper attacks on Britain's "gun culture".
Even when it became clear that Thomas Hamilton had acquired his guns because of
imperfect enforcement of gun laws, rather than inadequate legislation, the assault on legal gun ownership was redoubled. In the final inglorious months of the Major administration and with an election looming, ministers buckled in the face of demands that "something must be done".
Hamilton, a maniac with paedophile tendencies who lied to the police to get his gun certificate, was hung around the neck of Britain's 54,000 pistol owners, and historic rights to gun ownership were ripped up.
"When Dunblane happened, you just could not argue the case," says Michael Gault, a maintenance engineer with the RAF who is also one of Britain's finest shooters. "In truth we were sucker-punched: we couldn't argue with the parents over the bodies of those children."
The 1920 firearms act was rammed through parliament because of the recent revolution in Russia, parliament was terrified of the same happening in Britain.
