That's not the whole story though. Whatever weapons are available in the UK, they're far harder to obtain than in the US. It's a mixture of both of these issues. Whenever I visit the USA, what always strikes me quite quickly, is just how many mentally ill people there are literally everywhere just roaming the streets, and how the non-mentally-ill people deal with them. I've only had my life threatened once in my life, and that was when a homeless man threatened to kill me in New York. No big deal in the USA, happens all the time, but quite difficult to understand how you guys accept this "way of life" and just let it be and choose to do nothing about it at all.