At 12:40 27/05/99 -0400, you wrote:
>The USA is one of the top gun-owning countries, but there are others
>which have as high or higher rates of gun ownership. Switzerland and
>Afghanistan, for instance, though those two countries could hardly be
>more different from each other. In Switzerland, target shooting is a
>popular sport, with a patriotic flavor. Most adult males (up to 50 years
>of age) are members of the militia and normally keep a military rifle at
>home. Switzerland claims that it can mobilize a 600,000 man force in 48
>hours.
New Zealand also has very high levels of gun ownership per capita, although almost all the gunsa are long barrelled. Partially it comes from rural owners owning a large number of guns, ownership levels in urbvan areas are quite low.
The board stretched out in front of him, a swirl of geometric shapes and varying colours; a landscape spreading out over five hundred square meters, with the low pyramid-ranges of stacked, three dimensional territory increasing even that total. -The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)