Dear Donald…

Dear Donald Trump,

yes­ter­day eve­ning, you had a nice mee­ting in Beau­mont, Texas — which is a French name, by the way. During this mee­ting, you said this:

When you look at Paris, you know, the “tou­ghest-gun-laws-in-the-world” Paris, nobo­dy had guns but the bad guys. Nobo­dy. Nobo­dy had guns, and they were just shoo­ting them one by one, and then they broke in and, had a big shoo­tout… And, ulti­ma­te­ly killed the ter­ro­rists. And I’ll tell you what: you can say what you want, but if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allo­wed to car­ry… It would have been a much, much dif­ferent situation.

Well, first, you would be sur­pri­sed how open gun laws are in France. We actual­ly pos­sess about 30 firearms for 100 citi­zens, and I per­so­nal­ly knew a for­mer co-wor­ker who would some­times walk in the city with a .22 cali­ber hand­gun in his bag. Yeah, the city. Paris. The “tou­ghest-gun-laws-in-the-world” Paris, as you say. One ordi­na­ry citi­zen, mem­ber of a shoo­ting club (yeah, we do have some of those), who had a per­mit to car­ry just for fun and had bought his own pistol.

And he didn’t go abroad to buy it, either. This is what you get when you look for an arm dea­ler in Google Maps, here in Paris. Well, not all those are firearm stores: some sell knives, some sell air­soft repli­cas; but if you want to buy a firearm in Paris, you real­ly can. All you need is a per­mit, which implies money, pro­per trai­ning on using firearms, and safe­ty equip­ment to ensure your gun won’t get sto­len and misu­sed (a gun buyer needs to own a safe, for example).

We are not unar­med because the laws pro­hi­bit car­rying guns, we are unar­med because we don’t see the point of going through the pro­cess of get­ting a per­mit. And honest­ly, even people who do have a per­mit do not usual­ly car­ry their arms, unless they are on a trip to the shoo­ting club, a hun­ting par­ty, or a biath­lon trai­ning for example. You know why ? Just because they don’t see the point — because in France, we aren’t ter­ri­fied of each other.

But you know what? This is not the impor­tant question.

No, the impor­tant ques­tion is this one: before you assess the sto­ry would have been dif­ferent had Pari­sians been armed, can you name occur­rences, in modern days, in which armed civi­lians actual­ly stop­ped a mass shooting?

(Yes, I know there actual­ly were a dozen examples of people inter­rup­ting shoo­touts in the last two decades. Of whom about 20% were actual­ly not “real” civi­lians, but off-duty cops or mili­ta­ry. And we French­men are fami­liar with a recent event in which three people stop­ped a ter­ro­rist attack in a train, two of whom were mili­ta­ry on leave and none of whom car­ried a gun: looks like pro­per com­bat trai­ning is as effi­cient as firearms… But a dozen cases over some hun­dred events do not allow to make any assess­ment about what hap­pe­ned here on Friday.)