> " A gun for fun? No, not fine (let the properly-licensed gun range own and store guns, and you can go and shoot them for fun)."
Looking at some other comments, and it crossed my mind that this perspective is very urban-centric. If you live in the country, it's pretty safe and cheap to shoot some cans with a .22, but pretty expensive in time (and maybe money) to travel to a range. And it's that way in a way that makes socioeconomic class way more centric to shooting - more like a racket club.
At the same time, arguably concentrating all the shooters in one place might make things less safe: if you do something stupid on your own property with no-one around, there's nobody to get hurt. But if the person next to you at the range is a moron and does something idiotic like shoot at 90 degrees to the firing line trying to check if a round is chambered with their finger on the trigger, doing it at a range is way less safe than doing it in the middle of nowhere.
Now you might argue that people who've been trained won't do stupid things like that, but despite drivers being licensed I still see a lot of stupid on the road and don't really believe that it'd be any different with guns.
Looking at some other comments, and it crossed my mind that this perspective is very urban-centric. If you live in the country, it's pretty safe and cheap to shoot some cans with a .22, but pretty expensive in time (and maybe money) to travel to a range. And it's that way in a way that makes socioeconomic class way more centric to shooting - more like a racket club.
At the same time, arguably concentrating all the shooters in one place might make things less safe: if you do something stupid on your own property with no-one around, there's nobody to get hurt. But if the person next to you at the range is a moron and does something idiotic like shoot at 90 degrees to the firing line trying to check if a round is chambered with their finger on the trigger, doing it at a range is way less safe than doing it in the middle of nowhere.
Now you might argue that people who've been trained won't do stupid things like that, but despite drivers being licensed I still see a lot of stupid on the road and don't really believe that it'd be any different with guns.