[url]http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/674591/posts[/url]
Europeans openly brag about their utopian lives free from gun violence...
due to restrictive gun laws...they are waking up to smell the "cordite".
(EU writers like that expression though inaplicable)

Here is the important line:


This is a cultural phenomenon. It is bizarre, irrational, and self destructive. It has no logical reason for existing.

Every culture has a blind spot in some way or another. The American cultural blind spot revolves around sex. We are obsessed with who is sleeping with who and is it moral, even though there is no way that sex can affect more than the two people performing the act. Yet Americans consider it their right to not only know who is sleeping with who but to make judgments about those people based on their sexual behavior and to take action against them in their public lives.

In Europe the obsession is with who has power, they have already accepted being a victim, self abnegation has come to be considered the pinnacle of civilized behavior. The paradigm is that of the Holocaust victim who goes unresisting to the gas chamber because any form of violence toward his torturer/murderers is "uncivilized" and would be "sinking to their level."  A person who does resist is considered dangerous, because he or she values their self too much to be cooperative against their own self intrest.  Such people are dangerous cause they will either resist when the mob wants to take something from them OR be the cause of the next round of collective punishment.