Last week’s shooting and the suicide of its perpetrator in Poznań is still in the headlines. We are fortunate that such stories are rare enough in Poland that they remain in the spotlight of the media and commentators for a long time.

Meanwhile some right-wing commentators argue unreflectively that when it comes to bearing arms Poland should be more like the United States with its "good guy with a gun" myth. It boils down to the theory stating that if the man who was attacked also had a gun, he could have defended himself. Let's then consider a reality where access to guns is widespread so both "the bad" and "the good guys" can bear them.

As stated on usafacts.org website 20,958 people died in the United States as a result of homicide by firearm in 2021. Police statistics of gun homicides in Poland, on the other hand, also include attempted assaults and there were 27 such cases in 2021. The police, however, do not state how many of these cases ended in the victim's death.

The US population in 2021 was almost 332 million people and Poland’s - a little short of 38 million. A simple calculation shows that universal access to guns in Poland would potentially result in an additional 2,372 homicide victims per year in our country.

And we are talking about homicides only. Firearms in the US are also and even more often used as an instrument of suicide. 26,328 people took their lives this way in 2021.

Who would have thought that the time would come that we could almost agree with one of Janusz Korwin-Mikke’s statements. He rightly notes that in the past guns were commonly used in the European cultural circle. Luckily the times are different now, pistol duelling Korwin-Mikke mentions are forbidden, and this is why the tragedy in Poznan is so shocking for everyone. On the contrary, we would even go so far as to say that such an incident would probably go largely unnoticed in the US or be considered something commonplace there.

The poor regulation of gun ownership in the US shouldn’t be therefore considered an achievement, but an inability to take a civilisational step forward Europe or Australia already took. Probably the best illustration of this fact are the many TikTok videos made by US citizens living in Europe who find themselves relieved that they no longer have to fear accidental death in a mass shooting.