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Those seem like more "weird American law enforcement" things than inherent to gun control. Europe has largely [1] phased out guns in the past 50 years in a much more orderly way. It might not be a good idea that they did so, but it did happen in a pretty sane, non-cowboy, non-BATF sort of way, that I don't think would count as an "atrocity" in the regular sense of the term.

[1] With some exceptions. Carrying guns is still fairly common in sparsely populated rural areas, especially those with bears (northern Norway/Finland/Sweden). And, non-carry possession in the home is common in Switzerland. Switzerland is an interesting case because they cover both extremes: their law combines mandatory universal gun ownership with a very restrictive carry regime that makes it virtually impossible to carry a loaded gun out of the home (and even restricts the transportation of unloaded guns).




Perhaps, I don't pay that close attention to the countries my ancestors left, although I do know there a lot more legal guns owned than you realize, check Wikipedia, plus Germans for some inexplicable reason are thought to have keep possession of ... 26 million? illegal guns. Start e.g. here and note France and Austria as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_co... ; dig around in Wikipedia or the sources for official legal vs. estimated illegal.

But irrelevant to my general point of:

Gun grabber atrocities were followed by gun owner political power.

A stark lack of privacy atrocities is correlating with no privacy political power.


WRT of your additions on Switzerland: it's much less universal now, post-Cold War. They only manufactured a bit over 600,000 SIG 550s/Stgw [19]90s for a current population of 8 million. Per Wikipedia the size of the official army is now "about 200,000 personnel, 120,000 receiving periodic military training and 80,000 reservists who have completed their total military training requirements." With a 15 year normal term of service, if they're still following the old pattern of allowing you to buy a converted to semi-auto version of your service rifle when you muster out, quite a few of those have been removed from service.




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