You would go to an army base or a police station to get a gun? They don't have retail gun stores in Canada? Where do hunters shop?LOL. I'm so clueless, I didn't even think of this. Of course, there must be those in Canada. However, I won't google 'where to obtain a gun in canada' in my office as I might get myself in trouble!
By Western World, I meant Western Europe, Canada, US, Australia and NZ. I'll agree it's probably not the best term to use as it dates back to the Cold War where you had 'the West', 'the Warsaw Pact' countries and everyone else was 'the Third World'. Back then (according to my history teacher way back in high school), 'Third World' didn't imply poor or that there was a 1st or 2nd world or anything else, only not on the US or Russia sides of the Cold War. Switzerland would have been Third World.
But I was quoting (possibly misquoting) something I heard on the radio this morning.
It would be interesting to get more details from the link that Snidget posted on who owns those guns. I (perhaps naively) think that gun ownership in Canada is confined to the military, the various levels of police services (local, rcmp, etc) and hunters (and we have a lot of hunters). There will be some farmers, as well, who have them to shoot the coyotes and such. I'd guess that knocking out law enforcement and military, our gun ownership % would be quite small (percentage of citizens living in a gun-owning household.)
I just googled wikipedia and found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States has a section on gun ownership and states that " in 1997, 40% of Americans reported having a gun in their homes. At this time there were approximately 44 million gun owners in the United States. This means that 25 percent of all adults owned at least one firearm. These owners possessed 192 million firearms, of which 65 million were handguns .... In the United States, 11% of households report actively being involved in hunting,<64> with the remaining firearm owners having guns for self-protection and other reasons."