Just a Reminder, The Next Time A European Gets Huffy...

About these gun mass murders being an American problem. From BBC, April 26, 2002:

Eighteen people died when an expelled former pupil went on a shooting spree at his school in the eastern German city of Erfurt.

Masked and dressed in black, the gunman walked through classrooms killing 14 teachers, two schoolgirls and one of the first policemen on the scene before taking his own life.

He was clothed completely in black and you could only see his eyes.

Pupils of the Gutenberg School spent four hours trapped inside before police could declare the building safe.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder described the massacre in the quiet provincial city as "beyond the powers of the imagination".

And this account from the New York Times in 1995:

After murdering three relatives at home, a teen-ager walked to the next village today and calmly opened fire on a quiet town square, killing nine more people before turning the gun on himself.

The incident was the country's worst multiple killing since 1989.

"It was like he was hunting birds," said Guy Sintes, the owner of a cafe on the square in Cuers, a village near the Mediterranean port of Toulon.

Television footage from the scene showed sidewalks and a car spattered with blood and a bullet hole through a shop window.

"The people are devastated, totally traumatized," said the Mayor of Cuers, Guy Gigou. "The village is in shock.",

The boy was identified as Eric Borel, 16. The impetus for the killings was unclear. His father died recently of cancer.

Neighbors, interviewed on French television, described him as taciturn and said his room was plastered with posters of Hitler and neo-Nazi themes.

From the Moscow Times:

GALI, Abkhazia -- One night in June at a lonely Russian post in the small village of Sida, Sergeant Artur Vaganov, 22, of the Russian peacekeeping force here, woke up to commit mass murder.

Very deliberately, he cut the post's communications, gathered together all the weapons and opened fire on his fellow soldiers as they slept in their bunks. He shot dead 10 men and wounded three more before killing himself. The building was still awash with blood the next day, eyewitnesses said.

And this 2002 Time article:

Last week's mass murder of eight city councilors in a Paris suburb left not only a traumatized community and bereft survivors. Coming in the thick of a presidential campaign, alsoit, set France searching for political meaning in a fundamentally senseless act. Both major candidates, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and President Jacques Chirac, were on the scene before sun-up, condemning the attack in the same words, as "a murderous folly." Yet by the end of the day the two sides were enmeshed in a furious debate over the propriety of drawing any connection between the desperate act of a deranged man and "insecurity," a central theme of the campaign. Then that deranged man, Richard Durn, managed to commit suicide while in police custody, and the focus shifted again. How could government be so dysfunctional as to allow the avowedly homicidal and suicidal Durn to own and use guns and then make his dramatic exit?

You want more examples to show that this is not peculiarly or even especially American? See here.