Justice for the victims of the armed robbery today

The events in Farfield have shocked us all - this has shown that we will always have armed robberies, but also that our gun control laws are not working.

In 1997, Blair's government and his anti-gun lobby used Dunblane to force through legislation banning handguns. We aren't told much about the gun, but we are told it is a "handgun". All the 1997 law has done has put handguns in the hands of criminals.

The law-abiding citizen is not allowed to own a gun, and criminals know this, and ABUSE it. They know that they can raid a shop and can get away with armed robbery. In the USA it's different - the likelihood is there's a pistol under the counter or someone armed in the backroom, and they could get shot.

What we need is a real right to bear arms in our homes - and I'm not saying AK-47s, but a semi-auto rifle or .22 caliber pistol are fine to defend your home or business against armed intruders. Guns will always be around, and criminals will always get hold of them - when guns are in the hands of citizens, who will only use them in self-defence (and you'd expect training - there's some jobs to relieve the pressure of the recession a bit).

I'm not going to deny we will occasionally get massacres like Dunblane, and armed robberies. They will always happen. But the benefits outweigh the costs; issuing licences locally will mean that it is harder for someone who might carry out the attack, i.e. a convicted felon, the mentally unstable, "loners" and the like.

The point about "loners" is that Dunblane and Virginia Tech were both carried out by them - this instability means that they may not be of the right mind to carry a gun.

The 1920 gun control laws (our first) were actually to stop people taking up arms and starting a communist revolution. Before then the right to bear arms was protected by the 1689 Bill of Rights, which strangely enough is the origin of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.

I by no means want to see a gun culture of any sort over here, but Labour have already allowed that to happen in the underworld, so it's just about avoiding the glamorisation of guns. Guns aren't things that should be glamourised, they are just methods of protection - and it's about time that the liberals (who strangely enough tend to be anti-gun) recognised that guns are an excellent method of defence, and that criminals will always get guns.