Yeah exactly what Europe needs, More power to the employers so that they can tune up the marching songs for economical growth (the new god) from the back-skin of the working class…:mad: 😡
But, hey as long as the figures on the employers account book keeps icreasing, Hip hip hurray ….Hope they dont forget to grasb the “invisible hand” while dancing in their circle of joy, another victory from the common people….

Well, “economical growth” (sic) is what provides the tax base to pay for the cornucopia of State provision to which the “common people” are so addicted, and which creates the satellite TV on which they can watch their favourite “reality TV” shows…

Fortuanetly, frenchmen are among the europeans most eager to rise to barricades when ever the employers starts to believe too blindly to their perversion that when their personal economy is balanced, everyone is happy

The otherwise admirable readiness of the French to get stroppy ought to be seen in context: what they get really revolutionary about is any perceived threat of a reduction in State handouts, money taken from wealth creators and redistributed to parasites.
hps

A sad result for the ordinary working people of France. They can now look foreward to the same erosion of their hard won rights and conditions of employment as has happened to much of the working people in the UK.

Really? Details, please? UK citizens now “enjoy” exceptionally high levels of employment protection, welfare benefits, and minimum-wage rules, to a degree which of course inhibits full employment; in France the situation is even more extreme, with many employers protesting about the difficulty of getting rid of bad employees no matter how unsatisfactory their performance. Sarko might possibly amend this situation a bit, which could only improve France’s economic prospects.

..Sarkozys election may bring to an end the vital counterbalance to the Anglo/US axis which France has provided for some time past..

Uh? “vital counterbalance”? France’s quixotic attachment to perversity in foreign affairs, its reflexive opposition to what it sees as an Anglophone cabal, its inferiority complex concerning its reduced importance in world affairs, its infuriatingly equivocal attitude to the suppression of Islamist and other terrorism, do not amount to any sort of “counterbalance” but instead leave France’s Western allies and would-be friends feeling baffled and angry!

Certain states in the Near/Middle East may also have lost a valuable ally in Paris.

Which states? Not a single Arab/Islamic state in that part of the globe has a government that is properly democratic – in ironic contrast to Israel, the bete-noire of apologists for Islamist extremism…
Your partiality outstrips your ability to assess international relationships objectively – perhaps your sign-off tag about “non-aligned” gives the game away.
hps

…I also hope that this election will bring an eld to the stupid rivalry and nit picking we saw between the US and France in the past years.

I wouldn’t hold my breath – it’s a cultural thing, not a byproduct of who occupies the Elysee Palace, and it applies just as much to the love-hate relationship between France and England. Disregarding the predictable Socialist cant from our Finnish correspondent, France needs Sarkozy perhaps more than it realises: it cannot afford to keep practicing more of the same thing, which is what it would get under the fragrant, curvaceous Ms Royale. France works far better than it ought to under such a dirigiste tax-and-spend regime, and I look forward as always to my next trip on their wonderful railway system in a couple of weeks (Woosh! Lille to Montpellier at up to 300km/hr in around 5 hours, terrific), but like they found in Sweden there is a limit to the amount you can squeeze the wealth producers while subsidising the feckless underclass. Trouble is, the French are so addicted to government handouts that there will be big trouble if Sarko practices what he has preached, in any significant way….
However, any sort of return to free markets (something that terrifies & offends the French) will be welcome, and will make it easier for them to integrate trade with the rest of the West. I’m hoping Sarko’s tough talk on Islamism and immigration will translate into action, too – Muslims might constitute only 4% of Europe’s population overall, but their extreme elements are a disproportionate nuisance. Go to it, Sarko…
hps

I have to agree with your sentiments…but I won’t elaborate on them here.
It seems to me that because you questioned as to why anyone would want to own an automatic rifle, you had the question of liberty thrown back at you.

Yes, of course – it’s the natural response. Kev’s questions seemed to me to be crass and prejudicial. I pointed out that it’s not merely a matter of utility, but one of political liberty. It’s fundamental.

I am beginning to form the opinion that we don’t have the “liberty” to hold an opinion if it differs from that of the gun lobby.
I suppose I’d better just keep my opinions to myself.

You’re perfectly entitled to an opinion – one of the reasons I detest the anti-gun “control” types so much is because their police-state ideas on firearms ownership are all too often part of a more widely illiberal attitude that seems as happy to control people’s opinions as much as their right to own weapons…
But I’m sure you (& Kev I hope) would be the first to agree that opinions offered without consideration of the evidence, indeed offered without seeming to care about the existence of evidence at all, are not worth very much. I really don’t see the point of contributing to a debate on a complex, serious issue, without first reading what others have written and taking on board the considered, detailed, often well informed arguments they’ve presented. This is actually central to the question of “gun control” in this country and elsewhere: while legislation on such important matters ought to be based on diligent examination of the evidence and a deep respect for liberties that might be curtailed, this has hardly ever been the case. Most of our tangled web of firearms legislation is the result of secret deliberations, knee-jerk political gesturing – and the thoughtless expression of “opinions” by all sorts of commentators who don’t know a damn thing about the issue, and apparently don’t care that they don’t know.
hps (aka the “gun lobby” (sic) – a secretive body of heavily armed fanatics plotting to take over the world…)

If you knew me you would know that that proposal was made very much tongue in cheek.

But I don’t know you. And people have all sorts of weird ideas about firearms, usually based on ignorance.

I still can’t understand why anyone would want to own an automatic rifle. I don’t see the purpose. Please enlighten me….
Is it an image thing, for example, my gun’s bigger than yours so I’m a better man?
Is it so you can expend vast quantities of ammunition at a faster rate?
Is it some kind of strange psychological thing?

The tone of these questions is wholly tendentious – unless you’re being tongue in cheek? The answer for most people is, none of the above. And the more important answer is, none of anyone else’s damn business. Again, if you’d read the thread you’d have answered most of your own questions including this. You make it perfectly clear that you don’t like automatic rifles and don’t see why others should own them – but your personal prejudices should not, of course, have anything to do with someone else’s choice to own such a rifle. In a free society, that is.

But do you really believe that making guns available to the vast majority of the public has no bearing on the prevalence of gun crime?

It’s not what I believe, but what the evidence shows, that matters. Again, you haven’t read the thread, so we’re going over basic stuff: before we had any serious gun control in this country, for instance, very many more people owned guns, and there was hardly any gun crime, whereas now we have some of the most stringent gun controls in the world, yet gun crime has escalated enormously. Don’t you see the answer to your question implicit here?

Gun crime is a problem, so surely one way of lessening the problem is to limit the availability of guns. The laws regarding slavery were abolished in the United States, why not change the law on gun ownership? It could be done if the will was there.

See the preceding four pages or so… Limiting gun ownership by the decent majority has virtually no impact at all on gun ownership by criminals. This is not opinion, it’s demonstrable historical fact. So “changing the law on gun ownership” (nb remember my reference to 20,000+ gun laws in the USA…) would be completely futile as well as unworkable and disastrously divisive if attempted.
Sorry, I just don’t think you’ve considered the subject carefully, and you really ought to make the effort to read the considerable amount of information in this thread before passing comment.
hps

Is what I’ve suggested any more ludicrous than allowing/encouraging people to commit murder in the way this happened in Virginia?
No one ever answers the question as to why people are allowed to buy automatic rifles etc? Why would you want one? Unless it’s so you can put even bigger holes in a passing deer/prairie dog/roadside sign/university/high school student* (*Delete as applicable).
And should I ever become Prime Minister, please mind the door of the departure lounge doesn’t bang you on the a*se on the way out.

Well, you’re clearly not one of nature’s gentlemen, and your political sensibilities are a bit of a blunt instrument…
A quick check reveals that you admit to not having read the thread, which helps to explain what you say, without excusing it. If you were to spend a few minutes reading, you might wish to amend both your crass “radical proposal” and your fresh remarks. In sum:
– “allowing/encouraging people to commit murder” involves a large number of complex factors, and is not like mending a pair of broken spectacles with elastoplast: your bizarre suggestions about massive state bureaucracies, “banning” guns etc do not even begin to address the complexity of the issue
– “why people are allowed to buy automatic rifles etc” is, for anyone both reasonably knowledgeable about politics and concerned with liberty, the wrong thing to ask – rather, one has to ask why NOT, and have a damn good set of reasons…
hps

.. no one fired back during the Virginia shooting. In a Country where the majority of the population are entitled to own a gun, and where a large number of the population take advantage of that entitlement (some by owning several guns) it does seem somewhat striking that this should be the case.

I’m afraid you’re making the same mistake as most media pundits & politicians do in this country, whenever they feel the urge to compare UK with those gun-happy psychos across the Atlantic – as they love to think of our American cousins. The USA has a great deal of “gun control”, and something over 20,000 firearms laws, but the situation varies hugely within different jurisdictions. Around 40 states have “shall grant” laws that say a law-abiding citizen who meets certain requirements must be granted a permit to carry a weapon; these states have often seen a significant fall in the frequency of certain types of crime such as muggings, after passing a “shall grant” law. Not sure if Virginia is among them,, but crucially, Virginia’s universities are “gun free zones” – they forbid anyone to carry a gun. Naturally, this affects only the law-abiding, not nutters like Cho, so your proposal would fall at the first fence.

So, how about a radical solution?
At age 18, issue every American citizen with a sidearm and give them the training to use the weapon safely and ensure they have annual checks on both the weapon and their competence to own it.

Sorry, laughably unrealistic! Would entail an enormous bureaucracy, and (see above) the USA is a federation of states, so getting this agreed nationwide would be impossible given the vast variations; in fact, any attempt to impose this might start another civil war, with one lot violently resisting the imposition of this huge federal gun-control bureaucracy, and others violently objecting to attempts to make them use handguns at all!

Restrict the ownership of rifles to those who require them for work rather than sport. For example, farmers. Hunting rifles only to be loaned to those who undertake properly licensed, organised hunts.

You have an authoritarian turn of mind, don’t you… “Require” – ? Who is to define this? Policians, civil servants, police officers – ? Where are rifles to be “loaned” from? Police headquarters armouries? The cops are pretty hopeless at administering Firearm Certificates already, and the mind boggles at the poor duffers trying to issue rifles… But this suggestion is a grotesque police-state fantasy anyway.

Ban the use and ownership of all weapons which would fall into the same category as automatic rifles(?) e.g., AK47, Uzi etc., etc. As these are the weapons of choice for those wishing to use guns for nefarious purposes, any one found in posession of such a weapon should face the death penalty.

Ah, “ban”… Where have I heard that word before? Read some history – just a few bits of recent history will do, you don’t need to look at medieval attempts by monarchs to stop the peasants from owning weaponry. Bans don’t work – they penalise the law-abiding without affecting criminals one damn bit. Prohibiting alcohol in the USA produced massive almost universal flouting of the law, and promoted violent crime & corruption. Automatic weapons of the type you mention (which are far from the “weapons of choice” of criminals BTW – those are handguns, always have been) were “banned” in the UK in 1936 for no good reason. They weren’t used then by Brit criminals – but these days any lowlife drug-dealing tosser can acquire an Uzi or an AK by visiting the right pub…

By doing this, American citizens would maintain the right to bear arms but would limit the potential for the odd psychopath to commit such horrors as those seen last week.

Utter nonsense! If psychos want to kill people they will, alas, find a way, with or without hugely restrictive laws such as you propose.

In a Country where the Law is so useless that gun crime is commonplace,…

Again, see above – the US varies greatly both in its firearms legislation and the frequency of different types of crime.In general, those areas with the most restrictions on legitimate ownership of guns (NYC, Washington DC, etc) are the places with lots of violent armed crime; places with far fewer such restrictions (Vermont, New Hampshire, Arizona, New Mexico, etc etc) tend to enjoy much lower violent crime stats, and are often on a similar level to gun-controlled Britain in this respect. Until our gov’t actually banned civilians here from owning handguns, it was actually no easier to own a handgun legitimately in NYC than it was here! They’d had the Sullivan Act since before WW1 – though of course this never stopped bad guys from using handguns, in fact it encouraged them because they were less likely to meet an armed citizen – just like Virginia’s universities…

So if you’re going to propose any more “radical” measures, perhaps you should read up on the subject a little. And I do hope you’re not standing for Parliament – I’d find that scary.
hps

…My main reasoning behind gladly giving up a hobby / sport that I enjoyed so much and supporting the ban was because of seeing on an almost daily basis ,numbers of people with clearly identifyable mental health issues that legally held firearms and honestly thinking it to be an unnaceptable risk.

and

..there were a number who wanted to protest and fight the ban but there were more that could not put hand on heart and say they didnt see the potential for more tragedies.

I appreciate that you’re not a rabid antigunner, and not just trying to be perverse or contrary, but I confess I’m puzzled by what you say. I don’t know what part of the country you’re in, or what your shooting club background is/was, but your experience is utterly at variance with mine. I did not speak to one member of my clubs at the time, or other shooting people I met (and have met since) who professed to understand the ban and accept it as you do. Ten years on, everyone I know in shooting remains angry, disgusted, cynical about politics and the news media, and unapologetic about their love of guns & shooting.
I suppose I’ve met one or two gun owners I found a bit weird, but nothing like the seemingly significant numbers of people with mental problems (are you a health professional? I wonder how qualified you are to judge mental states – ?) you claim to have encountered.
As soon as I heard about Dunblane I had a feeling that this would mean the end of our handguns, but even I was taken aback by the wave of hysteria, rabid lying, crude anti-shooter propaganda and political dishonesty that followed in 1996/97. I’ve always been interested in politics, but it’s highly instructive when you’re part of a minority that suddenly finds itself being persecuted by politicians of whom Dr Goebbels would have been proud. I never for one minute felt I should be glad about giving up my freedom to own a handgun, and I don’t think you should either.
hps