I've got 2 and love me a bit of target shooting. Haven't killed anyone yet.

I've done target archery (though when I went with my dad this summer it was the first time in about 20 years that I shot an arrow) before and I enjoyed it, I see the shooting as an extension of that. I'd give clay pigeons a go, too.

It was just on my list as something I wanted to do, that I wouldn't get a chance to do back home. I'll probably sell them soon. I have learnt a lot about gun safety in the process though.

It would probably be easier for me to do than the target archery here. Everywhere I have seen that has a range seems to specialise in 3D targets, rather than the classic paper ones, which I'm not interested in. Making the move to pistols or rifles would mean I'd still be able to do the target shooting, albeit with a much more American flavour ...

A shop assistant was putting out the Halloween merchandise in a local shop and started a monologue about "why do they bother with all this awful stuff?"

It's clearly not loaded so that's fine. As an aside, my daughter calls guns (even her brother's NERF guns) 'die things'. I have no idea where she came up with that though

That being said, I was playing GTA the other day and she was playing nearby and kept yelling at me because I was shooting people.

There's plenty of illicit drug trade between Canada and the US, there are grow ops all over the place in BC and then there was this: Police can’t grab Barrie brewery after grow-op bust | Toronto Star

Canadians expected to spend more than Americans on Halloween | CTV Edmonton News

Maybe it's just the exchange rate though.

She just emptied it.

"die things" is great.

It always made me laugh.

It's one of these things Canadians go on about to make them sound better and/or different from Americans, yeah because clearly we're so much better than Americans after what happened in Ottawa the other day and Moncton earlier in the year.

It's just a myth. Like I said earlier in the thread, Alberta has the same rate of gun ownership as California and California has tougher gun laws than Canada!

Perhaps the general Canadian belief in this myth is what leads to the culture being less violent. It's all in the mind. Anyone who thinks it's hard for criminals to get guns in Canada is living in a dreamworld, CPS picked up some college kids running a grow op out of the basement of the house they were renting near me a few months ago and they had two handguns. This fruitcake in Ottawa apparently got the rifle he used from his aunt's house.

Sorry I most go now, I need to rant on about how much better our healthcare is...

What is with Americans and Guns ? Why do they have this weird obsession ?

What is it with the British and their obsessive fear of guns?

The NRA disguises itself as an association that protects the rights of gun owners, but is actually more along the lines of promoting gun and ammo manufacturers. Their solution to every problem is more guns, rather than preventing guns from falling into the wrong hands. If there were laws regulating the storage of firearms that were not being used or carried, then far fewer would be stolen. If there were laws that recorded firearms from a licensed point of sale to those recovered from crimes, they could pinpoint rogue sellers and buyers. The NRA are not in favour of anything that stops criminals from getting guns, in fact they really like it that they do. The NRA would be happiest if there were no checks on gun buyers at all, where everyone felt the need to buy a gun because they were afraid of being shot by someone else. Everything the NRA does is to make people more angry and more afraid: of each other, that their guns will be taken from them, of the government attacking them, and so they keep their industry churning at a high rate as the sheep keep eating it up.

I say all this as someone who thinks that guns should not be banned, that it is not only unfeasible but also dangerous to law-abiding citizens due to the horrific state that the country has ended up in due to the lack of restrictions I mentioned above. I never realised how much I disliked the NRA until I wrote all this.