Quote:
Originally Posted by mikey_the_redneck
In Canada, you can only own a hangun for the purpose of target shooting. You must be a member of a shooting range. There are very strict ownership/safety/travel laws in place for handgun users. You don't know what you are talking about.........
|
That has absolutely nothing to do with my point. (Besides, it's pretty much the same as in Finland, who btw has one of the higher numbers of privately owned firearms per capita.)
If people actually bought handguns only for sports (target shooting), they'd buy guns designed for that purpose. But because those guns are not as cool, they rather buy the cooler and more "fun" guns, even though they are actually worse suited for their claimed purpose. I'm not claiming it's anything but very rare for people to use their oversized guns for anything other than target practice, but really, there's no reason why a person should be licensed to buy anything other than a sports pistol (.22 LR, with a maximum clip of five rounds, for example) for the purpose of target practice.
There are a lot of perfectly valid reasons to buy guns. For example, we do a lot of hunting in Finland, and actually some of it is required for general safety. (The number of moose shot reduces the number of moose related traffic deaths, for example.) Target shooting is a perfectly valid hobby, nothing wrong with that.
However, just like when someone goes squirrel hunting with a semi-auto rifle, I call BS when someone goes target shooting with something that's not even close to a sports pistols, and I call BS when target shooting is used as an excuse for people to own all sorts of guns which are completely unnecessary for the claimed purpose of target shooting.
Sports are sports, excuses for banging away with big guns are quite a different thing.