Call me a tree hugging bleeding heart but....... is this shit really necessary?

Gun advocates will tell you that "Guns don't kill, people do" and they are right however when you put an unstable person together with a gun whose sole purpose is to kill people then you have a volatile and dangerous situation that can and will escalate.

Assault-style weapons easily available in Canada
Shopping online, it’s easy to forget that assault weapons are machines designed explicitly to kill humans in warfare.

“Your shopping cart is currently empty.”

This little notice popped onto my screen as I browsed the website of one of Canada’s biggest gun retailers, surveying the wide assortment of assault weapons it offers for sale online — including one virtually identical to the semi-automatic rifle used in last week’s horrific school slaughter in Connecticut.

Canadians often take comfort in the notion that spectacles of gruesome gun violence are part of a U.S. pathology that has prevented Americans from putting in place sensible laws to limit the availability of personalized weapons for mass destruction.

But the website of Manitoba-based Wolverine Supplies quickly corrects that misimpression, as it prompts me to load up my online shopping cart with a collection of “combat-proven” assault rifles.

The Wolverine site has all the consumer breeziness of online bookseller Amazon.ca, making it easy to forget you’re not dealing with books but rather high-powered weapons which have little use unless you’re planning to wipe out a SWAT team.

The Wolverine website features a section called “packing in pink,” with a drawing of a sultry, bare-midriffed young woman sporting a handgun, amid an array of pink accessories.

Certainly the website promotes the fun of guns: “Now that you’ve got your new firearm you’ve been waiting for, you just want to go out and shoot it!” The website advises you to read the instruction manual first.

Shopping on the website, it’s easy to forget that assault weapons, which allow the shooter to fire at every squeeze of the trigger, are machines designed explicitly to kill humans in warfare. They are not suitable for hunting, unless the intention is to pump bullets into a forest in the hope that a deer nestled among the trees might be caught napping. Quite the sport.

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2012/12/17/assaultstyle_weapons_easily_available_in_canada.html