I agree for the most part. Yes, it would be a terrible idea if every European citizen would be able to have a gun. If people wouldn't be buying guns for self-defense, they'd buy them with all kinds of bad motives in mind. It would make threatening and killing people way easier than if you only had your fists or maybe a knife to work with. But I also get where the other sentiment is coming from. A few months ago I went to a shooting range with a couple of people. I wasn't in a perfect condition to go shooting, because I had a very heavy infection in my right eye and all I could see was a yellow-ish blur. But because I'm right-handed, the instructor told me to use my right eye to aim for my target anyway. Even though I had never even held a gun before and I was almost blind that day, I did a fairly good job. I got to shoot with three different types of guns, ten times with the first two guns and five times with the last one, I only managed to miss my target once. As you can imagine, I was very proud of myself. And of course, when I heard about the attacks in Paris, I couldn't help but think "if I were there when it happened and I did have a gun with me, those terrorists wouldn't have stood a chance".

Of course, that's not a very realistic thought. I'm just a tiny girl, not much over 50 kilograms, would probably lose a fight from Stephen Hawking. Just because I did good once on a shooting range doesn't mean I would have been able to shoot the terrorists if I were there that night. First of all I'm one of those girls who carries gigantic backs with them with way too much stuff in them and it always takes me over a minute to find anything. By the time that I would have found my gun I probably would have been shot myself. Second of all, if I already survived the whole journey of finding the gun in my bag, I'm not sure if I would have been able to shoot the terrorists and only them. I can imagine that in situations like that people are running around screaming and they might not even notice that I'm trying to shoot the terrorist, so while I'm shooting, someone who isn't looking might end up accidentally between me and the terrorist and accidentally catch the bullet that was meant for the person they were running away from. There is also the possibility that, if I had ended up in that situation with a gun, I would have been too much of a coward to actually shoot the terrorist. What if I get arrested or prosecuted for this? What if this gives me nightmares for the rest of my life? What if other terrorists find out my identity and try to kill me and my loved ones as an act of revenge? Besides, I'm a vegetarian and I don't even have the heart to kill spiders. Death is just not my thing.

So these pro-gun people probably have this same idea in their head that if they were there that night with their gun, not as many people would have been dead. That could be true, but let's be realistic. Just because someone can be in possession of a gun, doesn't mean that they could properly use their gun in that situation. There's probably a lot more that goes into situations like that than we might even be aware of.