@FLeBlanc: Chill out on the language just a little bit, alright? Let's try to keep it at least a little bit family friendly, here. You seem to be getting a little bit far afield anyway, although I do basically agree with the Mexico argument, having lived down in Arizona for awhile and having seen a few things. The OP wondered about implementing Australia's form of gun control, though, not banning guns altogether. I guess maybe he could have put a little info in the original post about what, exactly, that entails; although reading it again, I guess he was just trolling anyway, and appears to have succeeded.

This has actually been a pretty productive little discussion for me, like always. At least, it's caused me to question a few of my basic assumptions. That's why I love you guys, I think. It's pretty easy to just stay in my own quiet, safe little world of beliefs, surrounded by like-minded individuals all the time as I am. Drawback of living in a small town, I guess.

Indeed. I mean, he is Executive in Chief, right? As in, head of the Executive branch? You know, the same Executive Branch that owns the ATF? I know it's the liberal way to dodge responsibility and blame shit on Bush, but fucking come on.

This is exactly why it's so tedious dealing with powerfully anti-Obama people. I didn't say it was Bush, and I would give the same response if (in this case) you were to call it "Bush's Fast and Furious". Whether or not it's the "liberal way" to dodge responsibility by blaming W, it's not what I'm doing. It's the idiot way to assume that others view the world as narrowly as some, and perhaps yourself, do.

F&F was stupid operation, but it was marked by failure to communicate information (including upwards, where the President certainly is). It was initiated prior to Obama's inauguration, though the "scandalous" portions occurred after. It was a low-level operation, definitely not one that the President was directing personally or, perhaps, even brought to his attention.The ATF had no actual director in that period, only an acting director, and it's not for lack of effort to appoint one on the President's part.

You can make the case that the President bears ultimate responsibility for everything that happens in federal departments but it is unreasonable to call it "X's Fast and Furious", imputing all or nearly all responsibility to X when it was not initiated by him, and was carried out far below him, almost certainly without any intervention from him. Naming it this way is the activity of either someone who hasn't given it much thought, or willfully wants to attribute it to X, facts be damned. I do blame Obama for trying to circle the wagons around Holder, and clumsily. I do believe that he placed obstacles to the investigation, though I maintain that there is far less to investigate than F&F fans tend to suggest. But trying to hold him accountable for the entirety of the operation makes it far more difficult to lay blame where it's due, and in the absurd effort to place it where it is not.

The border with Mexico is a critical factor in national policy. When it comes to forbidding stuff, it's one of the most important factors.

It's not necessarily a lawless warzone. It's actually kind of a pleasant place, as long as you know enough to steer around the worst spots. However, it is a place that is ready, willing, able, and goddamn happy to provide what people here in the US want, people who aren't afraid to deal in shady channels to get it. Has nothing to do with Iowa. Mexican drugs (and, eventually, Mexican guns, once the current price increases due to artificial shortages induced by the administration trying to lock down guns and ammo through stockpiling) reach all the way to the Canadian border and beyond.

And you can pretend all you want that guns don't provide protection; clearly you've been listening to MSNBC who wouldn't cover a good gun story if their lives hung in the balance. I have personal first hand experience that yes, guns can and very frequently do stop crimes in progress and defend people who otherwise would be victims.

Until the Mexican border can be properly secured (and that will mean endless amounts of liberal tears; a fucking ocean of them) there is simply no way that significant gun control legislation can work here. Congress knows it. They know that we would have an enforcement nightmare on their hands to make the current war on drugs look like a schoolyard snowball fight.

Why would anyone bother going through back-channels with (Mexican?) black market dealers to get something that is already freely available, legally or at least easily and with no real chance at detection, in the US? No need for catapaults. Even if gun trafficking from Mexico were a serious concern, which I'm not sure I buy, it couldn't possibly compare to the easy legal channels that already exist domestically. It would be like claiming that people buy beer from bootleggers today: even if it happens more often than never, anyone who makes a suggestion that bootlegging is a serious source of alcohol in the US would be exposed as a fool. If there were severe gun restrictions passed in the US, I would expect illicit inbound trade to pick up. But that isn't the case, and I doubt that any amount of smuggled arms would match the amount of guns already freely available here.

Oh and by the way, I've plenty of experience seeing guns produce victims where there would otherwise have been none. Not that you'd ever see that on a variety of so-called news sources, or wherever you go to enjoy anti-liberal screeds. You can pretend all you want that that isn't the case, but it is. Gun control arguments are about balancing the benefits of guns with the dangers, and until you admit the dangers you'll have a hard time making a good argument about the benefits outweighing them.

I never said that guns don't provide protection. They do, however, present a lot of risk to gun owners, their families, and innocent bystanders. If you want to argue that the protection element outweighs the risk element, that's fine. But don't pretend that my position is that guns are totally ineffective for protection (it isn't), or that I watch MSNBC (I don't), or any other number of assumptions. You have made a couple about me in the post I'm quoting; so far, none are correct.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The thing is every state (for the last 100 years or so) has a well regulated militia. It's called the National Guard. That sentence also implies that the people with guns would have been trained in not only guns but military aspects as well. Otherwise, how else can your militia be well regulated.

On the other side of the fence, we have to wonder what kind of people you keep around, where it seems like a normal idea for everyone to possess a tool that has the only purpose of killing and maiming people (i.e. handguns).

As you are in Australia, where handguns are almost completely banned, I understand why you have that view.
Target shooting is extremely popular in the US. My brother is a handgun enthusiast -- that is, he collects and trades handguns. I have gone shooting with him many times. In my view, handguns are both easier and funner to shoot than rifles.
I know many people who own and regularly shoot handguns.

Target shooting is popular here too, every small city will likely have a pistol club somewhere.
New members must keep their handguns at the club, while long-time owners can have a gun-safe in their own home. The situation still stands though -- if you go around to someone's house, and their Glock is out of the safe, it's extremely creepy as hell.
Yes it's a freaking cool object that's fun to shoot targets with, but it's not a freaking toy and should be in the safe for a reason.

I'm friends with a hunter (he largely lives off the land) who has a small collection of arms, and have had fun using them at a target range, sure. But when I go around to his house, he's a responsible gun owner so they're always disassembled (e.g. bolt removed) and locked up in a safe, with the ammo stored separately. If he just kept them lying around on the table like any old household tool, it would be weird and creepy.

It's still extremely weird to think that the majority of people would want to own one of these, or even keep it in their house, or on their person regularly, because defence.

Years ago I was friends with a coin dealer, he owns a coin store just a few blocks from where I am sitting now. We were together at an event where he brought several valuable coins, one of them in particular was one of his prized rare coins valued at around $1.5M. During the closed-door meeting he passed around about $4M worth of gold and extremely rare coins to a bunch of coin collectors, including me. He brought three of his employees to help protect his goods.
...
Since handguns are essentially banned in Australia and other countries, the coin dealer would have had other limited options to protect his wares. If long-barreled firearems were legal the four guards could have brought those, but it would have caused a bigger disruption. He could have hired police officers, and that would have been more money than bringing in his own store employees.

If the employees are registered security officers (again, having jumped through all the hoops, just more of them) then they could carry a handgun as required by their job. I assume guarding a few million dollars worth of metal counts as a genuine need.
It would be pretty rare to have your own full time security guards with the appropriate licenses though, so yes, you'd probably hire some for the event...
e.g. The guys that go around refilling ATMs with cash usually openly carry revolvers, so hand-guns do still exist.

With your coin event though, the assumption is that the 3/4 men with concealed pistols ensures that there'll be no robberies. Sure, if an unarmed robber tried it, he'd get stopped or shot... but what if 4 guys with AK's busted in and took hostages? Surely in that situation, your armed guards aren't able to stop the robbery without innocent loss of life?
In the US, it's legal to own an AK, so there's actually a decent chance of that happening, rendering your hand-guns either useless or a liability. Surely it's easier to reasonably secure an event where the chance of being out-gunned is several orders of magnitude lower?

I mean, obviously Hungary, just like every other European nation, is a perfect model for the United States, and what works for Europe (where surely there are numerous scarcely-defensible thousand km-long stretches of wilderness land border to defend) or Australia (who obviously has even more land border providing numberless smuggling routes into the country) will most certainly work for the US. Clearly, if we just made it illegal to purchase firearms here then the border to Mexico will suddenly not be an issue, rather than providing a million and one points of entry for illegal firearms to make their way into the hands of people unscrupulous enough to ignore those laws.

Australia has more coastline than any other country, the majority of it just as barren as your mexican border. We leak to oceanic smugglers like a sieve. People smuggling ("illegal immigrants") is as much of a major political issue here as it is in the US. Also, almost every single good that we buy arrives in a shipping container, and most of them go through a single massive port city. We can't scan every single container without starving the nation, so there's huge opportunities for large scale smuggling.
Due to supply and demand though, these unscrupulous people have to pay 100x the normal price for a smuggled gun... so ignoring the massive difficulties in finding yourself a smuggler who's not an undercover detective, it's at least 100x harder to get illegal guns now... so again, you mostly see them used by large organized crime groups -- the guys that are moving tons of cocaine, not your average criminals.

The National Guard is a subset of the Militia, not a replacement. The militia as defined when the constitution was written was every able bodied male between the ages of 17 and 45. That group is now known as the reserve militia and includes everyone who is eligible for the draft which would be just about everyone in this thread living in the USA. Regardless, the Supreme Court has ruled that the statement "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" is an example of why "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed", not a limiting clause. That should be clear if you look at the original wording before it entered review.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.

Interesting. This is what I got as the Original Text of the Second Amendment.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Now the original wording is quite different from the wording that made it into the Bill of Rights. So to say, "this is what they meant" seems questionable. Only because if that's what they meant, they would have had that verbiage in the Bill of Rights to begin with.

This is just sad all the way around. In Kentucky, 5 year old shoots 2 year old sister with rifle.

I don't agree with underlying premise, but I think the counterargument would be that you don't need hi-tech weapons to fight back effectively, as illustrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, but you need some weapons.

If you can't trust a sane person with a <any hi-tech weapon here>...Why can you trust them with a car, plane, pressure cookers, and the like?

What? I trust my neighbour to drive a (highly regulated) car, so I therefore should trust them to own a nuke?