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Notes -
In most countries with strict gun control, buying a .30-06 Mauser is as easy as being part of a gun club or holding a hunting license, sometimes easier than that. Bolt action rifles are old enough technology you can buy them through mail as antiques and barely even have to produce ID in some cases. And essentially everyone owns something like it in the countryside, for obvious reasons.
The gun control angle makes absolutely no sense and is completely retarded in this situation unless one is proposing to ban private ownership of firearms outright with no exceptions.
Came up in a different thread, but an urban college student is very unlikely to be allowed to buy a bolt-action rifle in the UK without being asked searching questions about why he needed it. He might have been able to manage anyway due to his family, but it wouldn't have been trivial:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3126/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-7/363028?context=8#context
Utah isn't urban though -- hunting is probably ten minutes away from this guy's house.
Not sure that there's really comparable locations that have colleges in the UK, but I'd guess that a student living in Aberdeen or someplace would be able to get a stalking rifle?
St. Andrews is pretty rural I think.
My impression is that getting a rifle is more difficult, because it's easier to use as a weapon and also just easier to accidentally kill people if you don't watch where you're firing. Shotguns are much more common. He might be able to get one but it wouldn't be easy and he'd probably need notes from a stalking club or something.
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Yeah especially when Tyler's experience with and access to guns is all downstream of his family. He likely doesn't have the experience or awareness to pull this off if his family and upbringing wasn't like 98th percentile pro-gun
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