Ok, not to sound like a cruel, sadistic, heartless sonnovabitch... which I am, but that's beside the point...
The United States has a drastically different culture (as these things go) than most other nations on Earth. Gun laws that seem appropriate in the UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan, are not going to work here, for a tremendous number of reasons.
Americans in general guard our freedom and our rights jealously. Our forbears went through far too much to give up that freedom in the name of safety. A safety which is largely illusory. The police will never take the place of one of my guns if someone should break into my house, and threaten myself, my family, and my earned possessions. Anyone who does such a thing has forfeited their rights, and lives only at my sufference. And in a place where it can take the cops ten minutes to respond to a home invasion, that's not vigilanteism, that's just prudence.
Hand in hand with such an outlook, and such real-world practicalities, lies also a massive issue of personal responsibility. If some idiot keeps a loaded gun in their nightable, then shoots themselves trying to clean it - that's their own damn fault for being stupid. A gun is a tool, and like any other, if used properly can be extraordinarily safe (there are more than 18 million licensed firearms hunters in the US, and statistically in terms of fatalities, is safer than *golf*), and if used foolishly, is deadly.
An outright ban, of the sort in use in the countries I named above, would be disasterous - even just from an ecological standpoint. Whitetail deer, in particular, thrive in suburban environments, and national herd now is estimated to be six times larger than it was in 1607. Almost 20 million of them are harvested annually by gun hunters, and yet, it is growing. Just this past season, New York changed their laws to reflect this, and instead of the one deer license and one lottery-driven doe permit, every hunter is now given *four* permits to *start* with. Eliminate that population control, and well... I sure don't want to be the poor SOB who's got to tell all those farmers just why their crops are being decimated, and all those people who have serious car accidents involving large numbers of deer crossings. Not to even mention the people who are killed more directly by them, via antlers and hooves (and yeah, it sounds silly, but the numbers of human fatalities caused that way are increasing steadily).
What we need to is completely shaft the current gun control, and replace it with something based on intelligence, and common sense, rather than politically motivated laws with a basis in pure, wallowing ignorance. Most of the laws on the books now are based solely on *appearence*. Most people, including some in this very thread, say things like "oh, hunting rifles are ok though, but no one needs an assault weapon to shoot targets."
Problem is, those people fail to realize that a great many hunting rifles are the matches of *military* sniper rifles (which should tell you something right there, if we've only had one sniper spree, and that guy couldn't shoot worth a damn). They also don't realize that automatic weapons are *already* way outside of bounds for most people. I know people who own them, and they pay attrocious amounts of money for a class III weapons license and the ammunition for those weapons. No one who has one would ever use one in a crime, despite what the movies show. Furthermore, they also don't seem to understand that there literally is no such thing as an "assault weapon"... that's a term invented by the media to describe weapons that they have no understanding of, and is meaningless. For crying out loud, one idiot in Newsday a few weeks ago claimed that there had been a shooting by someone wielding a ".380-mm caliber automatic handgun"...
More emphasis needs to be placed on punishing the criminals who misuse that right, and on education for those who are interesting in taking advantage of that right. Suffice it to say, that it is a right, and can only be overturned by another constitutional amendment, which will obviously never happen.
And someone pointed something out above that Alyeska didn't get to yet... they said that the first part of the Second Amendment, "A well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state" implies that only the national guard and military are covered.
Yet the case US vs Miller (1939) established that "The Second Amendment must be interpreted and applied with a view to its purpose of rendering effective the Militia."
They then went on to define the Militia: "The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. "A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time."
So technically, all citizens of fighting age *are* the Militia of the United States.
That aside, to be picky with the language for a moment, in the full text of the Second Amendment, the two statements are divided by a comma - which semantically indicates two distinct thoughts. Ie, that a well regulated militai is necessary for the security of a free state, and as a consequence, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
