Time to cut through the bullschtick.
America is not Europe, and Europe is not America.
What works in one will not necessarily work in the other.
Our history, culture, psychology, sociology, government both theory and practice, and our lives and lifestyles are VERY different on a fundamental level.
America was colonized by outcasts, renegades, rebels, outsiders, the desperate, the determined, those too different or independent to fit in well in Europe. Those colonists fought bloody guerilla warfare against the natives for a century, fought hardship and privation, lived far from villages and towns and help and developed an fiercely independent and self-reliant nature.
Mix English outcasts, Irish renegades, Scottish rebels, German mercenaries, religious outcasts, add a century of fighting the wilderness and the natives and you get a people unlike any in Europe. Mix in a lot of intermarriage with the Natives and a dash of their warrior culture as well.
Europe has been village-centered, group-centered, for over a millenia. Americans carved out family farms and ranches amid vast empty wilderness full of hostile natives. Our heritage is one of individuality and independence and self-reliance to a degree all but incomprehensible to most Europeans.
Private firearm ownership has been commonplace and wide spread since the beginning.
It was never common in Europe.
Western European murder rates were low even before the institution of strict gun control in the latter half of the 20th century. American murder rates have always been high, even back when guns were single-shot affairs and many conflicts were settled with knives and hatchets.
In Europe, gun control hasn't been as much of an issue because
there weren't many privately owned guns to control in the first place.
In America,
there are more guns than people, and most of them have never been registered and cannot be tracked.
Yet, we've seen gun control failures in Europe as well. Europe has as many mass killings as America, and they are often accomplished using weapons that are banned or highly restricted. See Charlie Hebdo, the Norway massacre, and others. Gun control doesn't work so well when individuals or groups are determined to get around it... it just ensures unarmed victims.
Most US mass shootings occur in "gun free zones"... allegedly gun-free that is.
In America, the massive proliferation of firearms that already exists makes gun control highly problematic. Even Canada had plenty of refuseniks during their attempts to create a long-gun registry, so much a failure that it was discontinued.... imagine trying that in the US and it would be 10x worse.
The large majority of our gun violence is felon on felon, or drug-trade related, or gang related. And frankly, it is still far and away better than Mexico, where legal private ownership of firearms is virtually nonexistent, but drug cartel warriors are better armed than the police and slaughter anyone who annoys them with near impunity.
These sum up the problems rather neatly:
America is not Europe, and never will be. European solutions will not work in America. Comparisons between the two are highly inaccurate, like comparing horsepower and computing power.
