Americans have guns because we believe that individual citizens may, god forbid, need to kill people. Many Europeans, by contrast, believe that they are past that, at a point in history where only the State needs the power to kill.
Who knows who is right. But it’s ridiculously arrogant to say that the American position is not defensible. It was literally just a couple of generations ago when the US was air dropping rifles into France to support the Resistance. Even if we have now entered an age where ordinary people don’t need guns—that new age is younger than computers, supersonic flight, or television. Its far too soon to conclude that’s this is how the world will always be from here forward.