Incrementalism.

[Democracyinkind]

112. Well yeah.

But you are free to do what you want with your semi.automatic aussalt rifles if it is privatly owned, which is the case for such weapons in the US. Not perefectly free to do what you want, of course. But it's yours.

The assault rifle in my closet - granted, full auto - is not mine. It is the governments. They spent hours and days telling me what the consequences will be if ever use that rifle for anything else than what they tell me to do with it.

A couple of years ago, they used to hand out ammo with the guns. They told me that I would go to jail if the ammo was ever opened in a situation short of war. In fact, they told me that if someone entered my apartment and threatened me, I'd still not be allowed to use that ammo and rifle.
They told me that should I ever remove the rifle from my home in order to use it for anything they didn't intend, that I'd spend my life in jail.

Then there's the serial number on that rifle. It leads to a pubic directory in which my name and adress are stored.

They told me that I would be liable for any damage resulting from theft of the rifle from me.

I haven't checked this, but I suspect that way more than 50% of the weapons that Swiss people have at home are of this nature.

What I'm saying is this is absolutely different from privatly possessing a semi-automatic assault rifle in the US. To equate these two forms of gun-ownership is simply deceptive.

This is not an argument that guns kill, or that less guns mean less dead people. This is an argument that the possession of the rifle to which this government forces me is not at all comparable to owning guns privatly, as someone in this thread implied (although I was pretty drunk when reading this thread so I might have misunderstood something).