I have never had any issue with the legal ownership of firearms.
Having grown up around farms, I learned at a very young age to shoot with a .22 calibre rifle. This was out of sheer necessity, as pest control was (and still is) a major problem in that district. Furthermore, my father worked for a time as a professional hunter. As a consequence, there were always firearms and ammunition readily at hand around the house. Later on, I took up small bore shooting as a hobby - something I have only given away in recent years, after my eyesight deteriorated too badly to be able to continue with it. (All the blessings of growing old!)
Just a word, though, about that article that appeared in The Federalist:
https://thefederalist.com/2018/04/13/britains-knife-control-bad-parody-gun-control/
The homocide situation London compared to New York is in fact rather more complicated than the way it has been presented by this source. It is true that during the month of February 2018, for the first time ever, London reported more homicides than did New York City -15 versus 14 (a fact widely reported on the social media sites). However, what The Federalist did not report that this trend was very much an abberation. For example, the three months January to March of 2018 saw 57 homicides in New York City, while London reported 45 such crimes during the same time period. Furthermore, by the end of June of that year, New York had recorded 141 homicides for the year, almost double London's total of 80 for the same six months.
Consistently over the years, New York's homicide rate has significantly exceeded that of London, as witness last year (2019); in which New York recorded 311 homicides, while London saw 149. Given the two cities have similar sized populations, that makes New York's homicide rate double that of London (despite what that article in The Federalist would have us believe).
While having never visited either city, I have had more than a few encounters with serious crime. For quite a number of years, I was an expatriate worker in a certain Third World country, whose capital city is recognised as being one of the more dangerous in the world. Furthermore, many of its outlying districts - such as where I was based - are even more lawless. There are in fact large rural areas that are scarcely under any form of government control. (To a degree, this was almost inevitable, given the way that that country was propelled literally from out of the Stone Age and into the mid-20th Century in just a few short years). Along with almost all other Expatriates who have ever lived there, I could spend an entire afternoon recounting anecdotes that include such subjects as tribal fighting, armed hold ups, terrorism, political assassinations, mass murders and many other such events:
- But all coming under the general classification "In that particular country, the truth is stranger than fiction!"