I get the sense that more Europeans than I had I realized have crafted their identities around a sense of smug superiority over primitive, barbaric Americans and a handful of stock issues like “the guns.”

Which is how you end up with people who probably imagine themselves to be sensible liberals laser-focused on “gun violence” as if it is a cultural trait rather than on the guns that literal fascists are currently using to murder people on the streets.

Liberals have done such an extraordinary job of connecting guns per capita with gun violence *causally* that some of them have convinced themselves that the mere act of possessing a gun causes gun deaths, as if contributing to some general gun-violence miasma.

So we end up with a situation in which the state is literally summarily executing people in the streets and all they can focus on is trying to talk people out of arming themselves in self-defense.