[laverya]

Even California and Hawaii don't ban hunting rifles. Same with Australia and the UK. Can you name a single country that totally bans the ownership of all firearms and enforces it? Would you like to live there?

(The rifle used isn't known yet, but only one shot was fired)

[FireBeyond]

Interesting choice of countries - as someone who was actually born in the UK, grew up in Australia, and now lives in the US, I have no idea what the relevance of those details has to what I said.

I merely remarked that someone else considered preventable gun deaths an acceptable cost to what he considered as sacrosanct. Well, tragic as his death is, I'm not the one who considered it an acceptable cost.

[laverya]

Australia and the UK are commonly used in the US gun control debate as places where gun confiscation worked, and CA/HI are the states with the most restrictive gun control policies.

My response was meant to illustrate that this was essentially not a "preventable gun death", or at least not preventable by any level of gun control ever implemented in a Western country. Similarly, the assassination of Shinzo Abe using a homemade pistol/blunderbuss was not a preventable gun death.

[twixfel]

OK but these assassinations an assassination attempts are happening in the US, not the UK.

[laverya]

Agreed, but the difference in the use of rifles in assassination attempts between the US and UK/EU/AUS/etc can't purely be because of a lack of gun control in the US if the same rifles are available in those other countries too. (semiautomatic military style rifles like used in the first attempt on Trump are almost always more restricted overseas, but again this was only a single shot and could easily have been from a bolt-action rifle)