But grenades are an important part of recreational fishing, a completely legal sport.

@Demonhunter

Why so serious? 

I wonder if those were assault grenades, or common grenades. Darned media never reveals that when against their grenade protectionist agenda.

think in CA they're all "destructive devices" unless they're for signalling

so you could tell the judge you threw it to let cops know where you were, maybe that could work

The Yell, you've completely missed the point of (at least my) objections to the USA's right to bear arms. I certainly don't think I would adopt such a triumphalist manner over a murderous attack in which many people have been injured and four (last time I read) killed. This is a tragedy, not a petty point scoring exercise.

The point I believe you are trying to make is "even though there are controls on explosives, this nut job managed to get hold of some and commit an attack. The ban is therefore empirically shown to be ineffective, so we may as well not have it". The flaw in your argument is that you have focused on one incident whereas a proper empirical analysis would look at statistics over much greater populations.

One potential measure of the effect of tighter gun control is to look at murder rate. Obviously murder rate has many more factors which I guess are almost impossible to decouple but it would be silly to suggest that the availability of weapons did not affect the murder rate. Anyway, comparing  USA with other Western nations with tighter gun control laws:

From   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Murder rate per 100,000 population - looking at the "most recent column" in the "2000s" table (because it includes more countries than the 2010s tables)

USA - 5.0
Belgium - 1.74
Ireland - 1.35
France - 1.31
UK - 1.17
Italy - 0.98
Netherlands - 0.93

Your argument breaks down because there is a much much higher incidence of murder in the country with an enshrined right to bear arms than those with (I believe anyway) tighter weapons controls. Focusing on one incident to draw conclusions is dangerous and logically incorrect. It is like visiting Scotland on a record breakingly hot day and concluding that it is always hot and sunny in Scotland.

I believe guns are banned in Somalia to...

Worstrum I am being humorous.

Surely some warlord said "no guns except my military"...

It is a good jest if you consider the outlandishness of it, and yet the feasibility of it. I dub thee humorless

> The Yell wrote:

>Whats the numbers for grenade kills?  Or IEDs?  BTW UK has almost no personal gun ownership and look at its murder rate.

Less than 1/4 of the US's murder rate?  Yay US!

You mean like STDs?

"BTW UK has almost no personal gun ownership and look at its murder rate"

Less than one quarter that of the USA. This is my point!

"So you renounce the gun control tactic of pretending such outrages are demonstrations of a failed gun policy?  My point was that pretending the "entire society failed to stop the madness" meme is outre"

To an extent yes. I think I would put it more like I don't think such rare incidents are demonstrations of a failed gun policy when considered in isolation. You have to look at the bigger picture including overall rates of violent crime and violent crime involving guns. However that is not to say ignore the incident and pretend it didn't happen. It would be negligent and irresponsible if the Belgian authorities didn't investigate how this guy got hold of his weapons and if everything was done to prevent it happening and make sure all is done to prevent something similar happening in future.

To take an historical example from the UK, after the Dunblane massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre) committed with legally held guns, it was concluded that it was too easy to legally gain access to handguns and that much tighter gun laws would help avoid a similar incident happening again. Would you suggest this was not the correct thing to do? It would be interesting to find stats pre and post ban to see if it made a difference to crime rates. Having said that there has never been widespread ownership of handguns in the UK so the ban would have affected very few people. The main point about this is that I can't think of a single significant downside to the ban, while I can't really comprehend an argument saying that limiting access to guns would not have benefits.

After the American Revolution, Britain said "screw it, there's no way in hell we're letting this happen AGAIN..."

(psst.. if the above comment was true, it wouldn't mean the people value their nation... it would mean the government values its power)