By Kevin Wilson
The incredible heroism displayed on a train in France the other day was pure, unabashed badassery. Between the unnamed French national that first encountered the shooter to the three Americans and the Brit who subdued him, it was a perfect example of what can happen when brave citizens stand up against those who would do them harm. Also, it should be noted that the National Guardsman in the group took the terrorist’s rifle and proceeded to beat him with it. That’s how you do it.
Now there will be more about this in other articles, but that’s not our main focus here. Rather, it sets the backdrop for the topic I wish to discuss: how the hell do these whackos keep getting automatic weapons in a continent where strict gun control is the rule, rather than the exception?
Naturally, this was a subject of much discussion in the hidden halls where we, the writers, ply our trade. There was plenty of speculation on the matter. One writer recalled people selling AK’s out of the trunk of their cars in Berlin. Another pointed out that border security wildly varies, and if one is willing to take an indirect route and grease some palms, there are plenty of places to cross from one country to another without being subjected to any real scrutiny. Then there’s the fact that the USSR churned out so many weapons that it’s probably easier to buy a truckload of AK’s, melt them down, and build a car out of them than it is to actually buy a car in some parts of the world.
I decided to do some research on the matter. After all, anecdotes make for amusing barroom discussions, but they’re a far cry from fact. What I found was, frankly, shocking.
In the United States, statistics on crime of all sorts are readily available with little work. Just Google the particular region and time period you’re looking for and sort through the deluge of data at your leisure. Hell, you can find it broken down by type of weapon and ethnicity of both shooter and shootee if you really feel like losing faith in humanity.
And since the data is made publicly available through everything from local police departments to the FBI, you can be reasonably sure that it’s not being spun. Raw data doesn’t lie, unless those collecting it are less than honest. And while I’m willing to lay all sorts of shenanigans at the feet of Uncle Sam, I’m not prepared to believe there’s some sort of coordinated attempt to fudge numbers across the nation. I haven’t nearly enough faith in the federal government’s ability to coordinate anything on that scale.
Try that trick with our neighbors across the pond, however, and you’ll find, well, nothing. Nothing of substance, at any rate. There’s a Wikipedia page that tracks firearm deaths by nation for a goodly portion of the globe. It’s a start, but not a very good one. The reliability of anything on Wikipedia is suspect, and this page is no different. While it offers figures conveniently broken down into deaths per hundred thousand, the data itself is often incomplete, and when the data sets themselves are complete, they often come from different years.
Like much of Wikipedia, it’s great if you’ve got an agenda to support, but a nightmare if you’re trying to find anything in the way of solid facts.
The rest of the search results are equally useless. Plenty of Gunz R Evul groups ranting about how we all need to stack arms and sing songs around the campfire. Breitbart had a couple of articles gleefully proclaiming that gun control is the most evil thing since televangelists.
As a rule, I ignore any source of data that has an ax to grind. I don’t pretend to be an investigative journalist by any means, or even a journalist, for that matter. Having said that, I do have my own set of ethics when writing these articles, and perpetuating bullshit runs counter to that.
So what does this lack of data mean? I have no clue. Given that Europe is a collection of countries with a variety of standards for information sharing, too many languages to count without taking off my shoes and socks, and not much in the way of centralized law enforcement (despite its fearsome reputation in movies, Interpol is not all that powerful), it’s entirely possible that the data is readily available, and I just can’t get to it. It’s also possible that it doesn’t exist.
And yet, when I search for “European weapon smuggling”, I’m once again flooded with all sorts of alarming articles. Everyone from Time Magazine to freaking Al Jazeera have covered what appears to be a massive problem. Weapons are being smuggled from Africa. Weapons are being smuggled from the Middle East. Weapons are being smuggled from the goddamn moon, from the sound of it. From the sound of it, the whole continent is one phlegm-laden sneeze away from open warfare.
Hell, if the five bazillion articles are to be believed, the rougher parts of Paris could pass for Mos Eisley. Wretched hive of scum and villainy, indeed.
I’m no more an intel analyst than I am a journalist. I’m just an artilleryman with delusions of grandeur. That doesn’t mean I can’t put two and two together, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone tell me it adds up to five.
The whole continent is apparently awash with illicit weaponry. 
While gun control in Europe isn’t nearly as strict or uniform as we’re led to believe, it is on the whole much harder for civilians to get weapons than it is in the States.
Aside from a few isolated tragedies, gun violence is seemingly non-existent.
Does that seem a little odd to anyone else?
As I see it, there are two scenarios that strike me as most likely: either the smuggling problem is being blown way out of proportion by the media, which is entirely possible, or those guns are going to people with discipline and a plan.
In the end, only time will tell. I freely admit that I might just have my tinfoil hat screwed on too tight. Hell, I hope that’s it. But if you’re planning on going to Europe anytime soon, keep your head on a swivel. Best case scenario, you pay a little more attention and learn a little more on vacation than you would have before. But as the events in France last weekend showed us all, you might just find yourself staring down a lunatic with a Kalashnikov. Better to end up on the news for beating him half to death with his own rifle than as a casualty of a terror attack.