Again

[pocaracas]

There are 300,000,000 guns in civilian possession in the U.S. Those guns are not going away.

Yep... this is one major point.
Almost one gun per person.

In Portugal, most civilians who do have guns have hunting rifles and keep them properly secured... most of them, at least.
And they use them for real hunting... hunting birds and rabbits and little else.

Other firearms are scarce in the civilian population.
And I feel they're not necessary. After 33 years in the country's largest city, I have yet to encounter a situation where the possession of a firearm would have kept me out of trouble.
Yes, we do have drugs addicts, and robbers, and some form of mob, but it's mostly invisible to the majority of the population.
Most street robbers use knives... if anything at all, besides their fists.
It also helps if you avoid tough locations.


Even if you are carrying a gun, you'd need to be properly trained, spend hours and hours every year practicing and spending money on it, just to decrease the odds of your gun ending up in the assailant's hands... or you misfiring and injuring a bystander.
That's where my question earlier on came from "would you fire first?" There seems to be too many conditionals going into the reply that, by the time you deem it "safe", the other guy may have already done some damage...

A few months ago, I remember a bill where people traded their guns for something I can't remember... it seems to have been enough to persuade a few gun-owners... perhaps it's worthwhile to continue with that program, extend it to any fire-arm... It seems to be one way of peacefully removing guns from civilians' hands.