Do you have any idea of how many Americans actually do protect themselves with guns? I would like to see your estimate, otherwise your above statement is without merit. I fear what you consider so obvious is utterly and fundamentally wrong.

A secondary question that I'm sure you will not answer is: how many justifiable instances of defensive gun use would it take for you to state that the private ownership of guns has a viable and necessary purpose? A percentage would be fine. A figure of 100,000 people "hurt" annually from firearms (injuries, suicide, and murder) would be a nice reasonable number to work from . . . So would 20,000 defensive uses be enough? 50,000, how about 70,000 defensive uses?

• During the same period an estimated annual average of 62,000 violent crime victims (approximately 1 percent of all violent crime victims) used a firearm in an effort to defend themselves. In addition, an annual average of about 20,000 victims of theft, household burglary or motor vehicle theft attempted to defend their property with guns. -- U.S. Department of Justice - Office of Justice Programs - Bureau of Justice Statistics: Crime Data Brief Guns and Crime: Handgun Victimization, Firearm Self-Defense, and Firearm Theft April 1994, NCJ-147003

• At a minimum, victims use guns to attack or threaten the perpetrators in about 1 percent of robberies and assaults--about 70,000 times per year--according to NCVS data for recent years. These victims were less likely to report being injured than those who either defended themselves by other means or took no self-protective measures at all. Thus, while 33 percent of all surviving robbery victims were injured, only 25 percent of those who offered no resistance and 17 percent of those who defended themselves with guns were injured. For surviving assault victims, the corresponding injury rates were, respectively, 30 percent, 27 percent, and 12 percent. -- National Institute of Justice - Firearms and Violence. by Jeffrey A. Roth

How many of those 70,000 people using a gun to defend themselves every year are you comfortable disarming and rendering defenseless? How many are you willing to condemn to death or injury just to bring to fruition your pie-in-the-sky beliefs? Disarm the citizens and watch the death rate climb . . . is that what you want?

How then do you account for the the number of murders dropping in America? Come on; how can there be 8000 fewer murders in 2005 than there were in 1991 when in that period over 100 million additional guns were bought by private citizens? Your premise fails miserably.

If you answer with anything other than "OK, you're right," you recognize and accept that other conditions BESIDES GUN AVAILABILITY are much larger factors upon an nation's homicide patterns.

The reason the majority of Europe is gun-free is not to control the criminal element and provide the people with a nice quiet neighborhood. Europe's gun bans were enacted for political reasons; the rulers wanted a safe and inhabitable society for themselves! Insurrections are squashed by keeping the subjects defenseless; that they are quiet and "safe" now is more an outcome of their historically servile status, not of the fact they just can't own a gun. If it was just "the gun law" that make those nations safe and quiet why hasn't it modified the behavior of Europe's violent immigrants, i.e. England's Yardies?