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Smoking gun?

To outsiders the American love of and for firearms and their widespread use - with all the mayhem and carnage that causes - is hard to fathom.

The die-hards claim they have a constitutional right to bear arms. But do they? The US Supreme Court heard argument on the very issue earlier this week, as the Washington Post reports in this rather "revealing" piece on the "thinking" of the justices:

"A majority of the Supreme Court indicated a readiness yesterday to settle decades of constitutional debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment by declaring that it provides an individual right to own a gun for self-defense.

Such a finding could doom the District of Columbia's ban on private handgun possession, the country's toughest gun-control law, and significantly change the tone and direction of the nation's political battles over gun control.

During oral arguments that drew spectators who had waited for days to be in the courtroom, there was far more skepticism among the justices about the constitutionality of the District's ban on private handgun possession than defense of it."

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