I think that the thing we Europeans (and us Brits in particular) often fail to grasp is that the USA is a very foreign country. I love my visits there and my US friends but it does not take a long stay for you to run into things that seem "incomprehensible" and you start saying to yourself "that cant be right".<p>However it works the other way too. We fail to deal properly with things like the right to free speech - and our USA cousins find that pretty incomprehensible - surely a fundamental freedom.<p>There are some huge cultural differences - made more difficult sometimes to understand because of the vast common components of shared culture.
In the US gun suicides outnumber gun homocides, so the gun control advocates add them together and call it gun violence to inflate the numbers for political reasons.
I know this seems odd, but are we not, all as a society, doing the same thing with vehicle related deaths? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...</a><p>So the UK 'allows' 2222 deaths to occur (USA - 33808) as they perceive the benefit of vehicles to be worth that cost.<p>The USA does the same with guns.