Think of America more like 50 countries. Now take your school shooting example. A lot of states have made changes to their gun laws in response to this. Making federal (i.e. applies to all states) gun law changes is more challenging because you have to get 75% of the states on board with any constitutional changes. Without a constitutional amendment, any gun legislation ultimately must respect the existing 2nd Amendment so it's not possible to have Japan-esque policies without a constitutional amendment. Also USA takes up an entire continent so different regions of the us have different cultures and sentiment towards guns. People living in highly rural areas like Montana probably have favorable gun ownership sentiment. People living in highly urban areas like NYC usually have negative gun sentiment.

> linked by a common thread of inaction towards things that should in principle be solved.

Yes, but this is hardly unique to the US. Various European countries and the EU as a whole often suffer similarly.

It's not like the EU took one look at the Draghi report and immediately started to fix things; often the cultural and policy issues causing the problem also make it harder to implement new fixes to the problem.

Each one of these has a knee-jerk European response that either completely ignores reality or violates a half dozen or more laws.

Two examples:

1. "Police violence." What violence? Against whom? In a year approximately 50 million people have a police interaction (not the total number of all interactions). About 75,000 people are taken to a hospital following police use of force and about 600 people (0.001%) are killed. Of course the ideal number is zero but 0.001% doesn't seem like there is an epidemic of police violence sweeping through the country.

2. "Alternative (public) transportation." Again you're not being particularly clear on what the fix is here. Most major cities have some form of transit, be it busses, subways, or above-ground rail. If you're talking about major city-to-city high speed rail an LA-to-NYC rail system would be like putting in rail from Paris to northern Kazakhstan. San Diego to Chicago would be like London to Kazan (845km east of Moscow). Iowa is a medium-sized state most in the US never visit and never think about, and it's almost twice the size of Austria. Europeans who rail (pun intended) about how it's so dumb the US doesn't have high speed rail haven't taken the requisite 5 minutes to understand the difference in scale when you're talking about connecting the east and west coasts of the US.

What's more likely? That the US with ~350 million people just decides to ignore these "issues," or that there's something the average person who doesn't live here is misunderstanding?

This can be seen as backlash politics, where deeply rooted racial divisions are used to convince large groups to vote against their own interests in order to withhold any benefit to lesser groups. Two excellent books that explore this issue are The Politics of Resentment and Dying of Whiteness.

It's my pet theory that many Americans are unable to reason in positive freedoms. They don't often think about the freedom to not die in a car crash, or from a preventable disease.

There is no such major group. There are people who think saving lives or improving quality of life does not matter, but those are also against individual liberties. They care about lowering taxes, more or less. They care about hierarchy.

But they do not care about liberties or freedom as such, not for anyone except the top of the hierarchy. They are consistently voting for politicians that restrict those and want to return back to times when average person was considerably less free. They are good at using freedom as a slogan, as an excuse to enact anti-freedom agenda, repeatedly, again and again.

Yes, I'd even add that those liberties are almost all negative liberties: freedom to X instead of freedom from Y. Few are interested in defending the freedom to not die in a car crash.