I think for many of us outside the US, your culture of dog eat dog and I owe nothing to nobody except my sacred duty to get rich is the root of your social problems.
America has its fair share of problems. However, after having lived in several European countries for the better part of a decade, let us not delude ourselves to the myriad of problems, albeit different, that euro countries have.
And they're not better problems either, they're just different.
Who knows. He's most likely salty that I poured cold reality on his fetishization of Europe. This happened to me a lot when I came back to America as there's a certain group of people who really do think Europe is better than America when the reality on the ground is far from it.
Let me turn that around and suggest that when America finally embrace universal culture, it will understand that arming every random person with an assault rifle with extended magazine is a very, very bad idea.
It’s probably at the root of some of the US’s social problems, but perhaps a bigger factor in the US having loads of mass shootings is ready availability of guns suited to doing mass shootings with.
There have been mass shootings in many European countries, and in most cases they’ve led to heavy crackdowns on the availability of appropriate weapons, after which the mass shootings stop.
I'm an American living in France. I get panicked messages from family all the time about this. It's incredible how much American media overstated the gravity of protests in France. Protests happen every weekend. Always registered with the police. But you often have "spoilers" who are just kids looking to break things. In rare cases, it's actually real protesters. And even then, the scope of the "rioting" is limited to one or two blocks maximum.
All the storefronts have insurance so any visible damage is quickly repaired.
I have never seen a riot in Paris and I've been here since 2020. Nor does it interfere with the lives of anyone I know here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests - French people are angry as well and they called themselves "yellow vests", both literally and figuratively, to get noticed. By people like you who don't seem notice.
