Firearms in Europe are supposedly severely controlled. Comments in the reality from a London Telegraph blogger.
"Like everyone else, my first reaction was horror. I get queasy watching a Hollywood fight scene, so the idea of people being gunned down in cold blood was unbearable. I could imagine the scene all too clearly. When I worked for a French magazine publisher, I was at plenty of editorial meetings, none of which ended with two men firing AK47s. The worst ending we ever experienced was a marketing person snarling at us to change our cover to make it more “grand public” (mass-market). It feels shameful now to remember how heated our trivial arguments used to become.
I must confess, though, that I wasn’t exactly surprised by the attack. First of all, there have been plenty of shootings with AK47s in France recently. They seem to be as trendy as iPhones. They even have a slang name in French – “une kalache“. Most of them are apparently in the Marseille area, in the possession of drug gangs, but they also get sold on to the rest of France. A couple of years ago, only three or four kilometres from where I live, some Polish men were walking to a birthday party when they were stopped by two muggers, one of whom had a Kalashnikov. When the Poles refused to hand over their money, the gunman let rip, killing one victim and shooting his friend in the foot. The police caught them soon afterwards, after a man arrived at a nearby hospital complaining that he’d lost some of his toes in an accident. It sounds insane, but it’s true, and the surviving Poles were probably lucky that their mugger hadn’t had any weapons training."
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/expa...r-or-peace-in-paris/