I saw this headline in The Wall Street Journal.

Gun Use Surges in Europe, Where Firearms Are Rare
Growing insecurity spurs more people to clear high bars for ownership

Really?

When hundreds of women were sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve in several German cities three years ago, Carolin Matthie decided it was time to defend herself. The 26-year-old Berlin student quickly applied for a gun permit, fearing many women would have the same idea and flood the application process.

“If I don’t do it now, I will have to wait maybe another half year,” she recalls thinking.

Wow, Europe sucks for gun permits.  It takes less time for the ATF to approve the paperwork to put a suppressor on your short barreled cannon.

I hope nobody in the California legislature reads this article, they might get the idea of requiring a 547 day waiting period.

Gun ownership is rising across Europe, a continent that until recently faced far less gun crime and violence than much of the globe. Not long ago it was rare to see armed British police.

The uptick was spurred in part by insecurity arising from terrorist attacks—many with firearms, and reflects government efforts to get illegal guns registered by offering amnesty to owners.

I’m confused by that.  Gun ownership is rising.  Are Europeans buying more guns?  Or, are is the number of guns in private hands being legalized by getting people to apply for permits for the guns they already have?  The wording here is very awkward.

All that aside, I don’t want to skip over the broader point from the first few paragraphs.  At least some small segment of the European population is realizing that the great bloated bureaucracy of European governments can’t protect them from the dangerous migrants entering the country, many at the best of the leaders of the great bloated bureaucracy.  They feel the need to be able to defend themselves.

This is going to require a titanic shift in the ideology of Europeans.

From The Daily Mail.

Swiss woman is charged with assault after slapping Afghan migrant who kept groping her during New Year’s Eve celebrations

A Swiss woman has been charged with assault after slapping an Afghan migrant who allegedly groped her during a New Year’s Eve street party.

The unnamed woman, 21, was said to have left the man with a broken nose when he reportedly groped her during a party at the City Hall in the Austrian capital Vienna.

Local media alleged that a 20-year-old Afghan suspect was part of a migrant gang who were allegedly assaulting women in the crowd during the New Year celebrations.

According to the Vienna Police, the Swiss woman reacted angrily when she was fondled by the migrant and smacked him full in the face.

He was taken to hospital to be treated and a criminal charge for sexual harassment was filed against the 20-year-old Afghan, and a criminal complaint against the victim for GBH.

Under Austrian law, the police have a duty to file a criminal complaint when the alleged offence is of such severity that prosecutors have no choice but to pursue it.

Feudalism has never really left Europe.  The pedantry worked the land and in exchange they were defended by the feudal lord and his professional army (slightly romanticized but accurate).  The peasants were not allowed to bear arms just in case they got sick of being serfs (land slaves) and decided to fight for their independence.  Eliminating self defense and putting all protections in the hands of the nobility was a means of controlling the peasantry.

The Japanese did the same thing by the way, for all that pop culture thinks about the Katana, a Japanese peasant was prohibited from owning or even touching a sword.  The penalty for violating that was death.  Only the Shogunate were allowed to poses swords.

In America, where there is no history of feudalism, we (for the most part) believe in the right to self defense.  Living in an unsophisticated, redneck state like Alabama, had said groper ended up being taken to the hospital gushing blood from one or more entry or puncture wounds, the general attitude by all, including the police would be “the fucker deserved it.”

Europeans may be buying more guns with the intent of self defense, but the European governments need to legalize self defense.

Back to the WSJ.

Europe is still far from facing the gun prevalence and violence in Latin America or the U.S., which lead the world. World-wide civilian ownership of firearms rose 32% in the decade through 2017, to 857.3 million guns, according to the Small Arms Survey, a research project in Geneva. Europe accounts for less than 10% of the total.

Fuck you WSJ.  The rate of US gun violence vs gun ownership is radically different than the rate of Latin American gun violence vs gun ownership.  The US has a culture and legal protection of civilian gun ownership so most US gun owners are law abiding.  Latin America has cracked down more and more on legal gun ownership, so more and more guns are possessed only by criminals.  Moreover, the corruption and political instability in Latin America has lead to the rise of paramilitary gangs unrivaled by anything in the US.

But Europe’s shift has been rapid, and notable in part because of strict national restrictions. In most European countries, gun permits require thorough background checks, monitored shooting practice and tests on regulations. In Belgium, France and Germany, most registered guns may only be used at shooting ranges. Permits to bear arms outside of shooting ranges are extremely difficult to obtain.

Strict registration requirements don’t account for—and may exacerbate—a surge in illegal weapons across the continent, experts say.

No shit.

Europe’s unregistered weapons outnumbered legal ones in 2017, 44.5 million to 34.2 million, according to the Small Arms Survey. Many illegal weapons come from one-time war zones, such as countries of the former Yugoslavia, and others are purchased online, including from vendors in the U.S.

I’ve heard of guns coming into Europe from recent Eastern European war zones, as well as Russia, and even being carried in by migrants from the Middle East.  It’s not hard to get an AK in Syria, and carry it through Turkey into Central Europe.  I just want to know how someone orders a gun from Gun Broker and gets it shipped to Germany illegally, that I don’t see happening.

With more weapons comes more gun-related violence. National police statistics in France, Germany and Belgium show an uptick in gun law violations since 2015. Europe doesn’t have current continentwide statistics.

Now I am really confused.

Are we talking about Europeans buying legal guns and getting permits for self defense?

Are we talking about Europeans buying illegal guns for self defense because they can’t get them legally?

Are we talking about criminals getting illegal guns to commit more gun crime?

This article seems to be all over the map on this.

Armed robbery and similar crimes often entail illicit guns, while legally registered firearms tend to appear in suicide and domestic-violence statistics, said Nils Duquet of the Flemish Peace Institute, a Belgian research center.

“It’s clear that illegal guns are used mostly by criminals,” he said.

No shit (in French).

In Germany, the number of legally registered weapons rose roughly 10%, to 6.1 million, in the five years through 2017, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to Germany’s National Weapons Registry. Permits to bear arms outside of shooting ranges more than tripled to 9,285, over the same five years.

Permits for less lethal air-powered guns that resemble real guns and shoot tear gas or loud blanks to scare away potential attackers roughly doubled in the three years through the end of 2017, to 557,560, according to the registry.

Ms. Matthie first bought an air gun, which her permit allowed her to carry with her.

She has since become a sports shooter, using live ammunition at shooting ranges, and is now applying for a firearm permit. She posts a daily video blog where she advocates armed self-defense.

In Belgium, firearm permits and membership in sport-shooting clubs has risen over the past three years.

So now we’re back to legal Europeans buying legal guns and other self defense items legally because they are afraid because of what has been happening in their own countries.

I have noticed that I cannot go to The Daily Mail, The Sun, or The Spectator and not read about another rape of a European woman by a migrant on a daily basis.

Belgian applications for shooting licenses almost doubled after the terrorist attacks by an Islamic State cell in Paris in Nov. 2015 and four months later in Brussels, offering “a clear indication of why people acquired them,” said Mr. Duquet.

We see the same thing in the US after a terrorist attack.  Maybe relying on the goverment to protect you under all circumstances doesn’t work.

In Paris, the suicide bombers also used machine guns to mow down restaurant and nightclub patrons—weapons they acquired on the black market and were tracked to a shop in Slovakia.

Now we’re back to illegal guns again.

Belgium has for years tightened regulations in response to gun violence, such as a 2006 killing spree by an 18-year-old who legally acquired a rifle.

“Before 2006, you could buy rifles simply by showing your ID,” recalled Sébastien de Thomaz, who owns two shooting ranges in Brussels and previously worked in a gun store.

“They used to let me shoot with all my stepfather’s guns whenever I joined him at the range,” said Lionel Pennings, a Belgian artist who joins his stepfather at one of Mr. De Thomaz’s shooting ranges on Sundays.

Mr. Pennings recalled that in the past he could easily fire a few rounds with his stepfather’s gun. “Now it’s much stricter,” he said. “You can only use the guns you have a permit for.”

This will be the democrat gun policy in 2020.

A Belgian would-be gun owner must pass almost a year of shooting and theory tests, plus psychological checks, said Mr. De Thomaz.

Proposed New York and California gun policy 2019, after they get the right to read your Facebook history.

The gun-range owner questions the impact of that policy. “With each terror attack, the legislation gets stricter,” he said. “For the black market, everything stays the same.”

No shit.

This article seemed like it wanted to be an anti-gun article by conflating gun crime, illegal guns, and legal gun purchases.  As such it was poorly written for a WSJ article.

The important take away is that Europeans are scared and some are trying to guy legal guns to defend themselves.

We saw the same thing in Israel during the Knife Intifada.  Israeli gun stores were sold out.

The difference is that Israel encouraged its citizens to be part of the solution to stabbings by defending themselves and loosening the restrictions on gun permits.  Israel has more of a culture of self defense than Europe.

That will be the big hurdle for Europe to clear.  Understanding that when someone tries to sexually assault a person, stab them, beat them from the back of a scooter, or break into their home to rape and rob them, said person has the right to fight back with force, including legal force.