How Much Truth Is There in the Claim that Gun Control Works Wonders in Europe and Around the Rest of the World?

In the wake of Nikolas Cruz's Florida school massacre, gun control has (needless to say) reared its head.

Following the 2017 reports on the Las Vegas shooting, said to be the deadliest in United States history,

Connecticut’s senators, who have been especially outspoken on gun control ever since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, were among the first to issue statements … “Nowhere but America do horrific large-scale mass shootings happen with this degree of regularity,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in a statement. “This must stop.”

How much truth, though, is there to that declaration?

Time to brush off the principal outtake from my in-depth examination of the gun control issue, which was published in the New York Times two years ago, updating it slightly in the process:

It is easy for leftists, American as well as foreign, to tout the success of the gun control laws in the rest of the western world and to say that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries” when you ignore:
• the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school;
• the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan;
• the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France;
• the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany;
• the 2007 fatal shootings of eight people in Tuusula, Finland;
• the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later;
• the 2009 killing of 15 people in Winnenden, Germany;
• and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers;
• not to mention the various terrorist attacks of the last few years, such as the 2015 mass shootings inside the Bataclan nightclub which killed 90 Paris revelers.

Is it unrealistic to wonder whether the tolls would have been lesser had a few of the adults in each place carried a weapon and tried to shoot back at the respective killers?

Related: What Is to Blame for Mass Shootings? Does the Blame Lie with the Right to Bear Arms Or Can It Be Found Elsewhere? (a lengthy and in-depth post that I consider one of my best in 13 years of blogging)

From the archives: Another Mass Killing, Another Nutcase with Plenty of Warning Signs

— with a quote from Ann Coulter:

"here’s the problem: Coddling the mentally ill isn’t even helping the mentally ill. … Something seems to have gone horribly wrong right around 1970. What could it be? …

That date happens to correlate precisely with when the country began throwing the mentally ill out of institutions in 1969. Your memory of there not being as many mass murders a few decades ago is correct. Your memory of there not being as many homeless people a few decades ago is also correct. But liberals won’t allow the dangerous mentally ill to be committed to institutions against their will." …

N Joe, who used to blog for No Pasarán many years ago, says that whereas half a million people were institutionalized half a century ago — when the U.S. population was far lower — in our day and age, the number of people committed to asylums is, thanks to leftist "compassion" policies, as low as 5,000.