The US has a different culture and is in a different situation than Europe. The US is flooded with weapons and no one can remove them again. Therefore every thug has a gun and I can understand that people don't feel safe anymore. What are they supposed to do? Ban weapons? Impossible as everybody has one and can hide them. One would never be able to find all guns and remove them so I guess it's just normal that people are gearing up in order to not be out gunned by thugs.
On the other hand here in comparatively quiet Europe we see these facts:
~30,000 gun related fatalities in the US every year. At roughly 320 million people it averages a 0.009 % likelihood to get killed by a gun per year. In 2013 3,340 people got killed in traffic related accident in Germany. With 80.7 million people the chance to get killed in traffic was 0.0041 % in that year.
That makes it about twice as likely to get killed by a gun in the US than to to be killed in traffic in Germany (calculated that myself with Wikipedia data so it's not dead accurate). That's why we are glad that our continent isn't flooded with weapons.
So guys, please have a look at both sides and the preconditions on both sides before getting into the eternal "Guns make us all safe, we need more guns to end death" vs. "You are all trigger happy idiots!" arguments.
