Probably because nobody except police carries guns (in particular pistols) here at all. Whether concealed or not. You just can't get a carry permit. There is no such thing.
The only way you can get a pistol is for sports shooting and you must carry it in a closed case all the time, and it must be to/from the shooting range.
Rifles are easier to get for hunting but of course this is not what people carry regularly in the US.
But more generically: In Europe we have nothing like the second amendment. This is what makes even the gun-hostile places in the US less gun-hostile than Europe, because they still have to abide by the constitution.
> Probably because nobody except police carries guns (in particular pistols) here at all. Whether concealed or not. You just can't get a carry permit. There is no such thing.
That is also how US megacities work.
> In Europe we have nothing like the second amendment. This is what makes even the gun-hostile places in the US less gun-hostile than Europe, because they still have to abide by the constitution.
> The en banc Ninth Circuit last week held that the Second Amendment does not extend to open public firearm carriage. The new [decision] in Young v. State of Hawaii complements the Circuit's en banc from five years earlier, Peruta v. San Diego, which held that concealed carry is outside the Second Amendment.
> By statute, Hawaii has a restrictive "may issue" carry licensing system. If an applicant proves "sufficient" "urgency or need," then a police chief "may" issue a permit.
> In practice, Hawaii is "never issue."
Notionally, they are obligated to obey the constitution. But there's no one to make them do it, so they don't.
You also find things like New York passing a law which allows possession of a gun outside the home in only two circumstances: if you are bringing it from your home to a firing range, or if you are bringing it from a firing range back to your home. Notably, this "accidentally" banned transporting a gun from the store where you purchased it to your home.
The idea that the most gun-hostile places in America are more gun-loving than what you can find in Europe is self-evidently insane; the claim is that a bunch of people who largely define themselves by their opposition to guns are nevertheless more gun-friendly than a bunch of other people who rarely think about guns at all.
Laws on the books aside, are there big cities in Europe where there are more shootings than in American mega-cities NYC, Chicago, or LA? If so, they don't make the news here in the US much.
I think you have the causality reversed: the reason gun-hostile politicians and activists are so vocal in the US is because the country has so many guns in so many members of the public, both in an out of cities. I haven't seen their vocalness successfully eliminate the guns and shootings from their cities.
Its also worth pointing out that all large American cities aren't equal in terms of crime stats - NYC is (surprisingly, to many people) among the safest. I can remember reading headlines within the last decade about London notably reaching a higher murder rate, despite London presumably having something closer to total prohibition of firearms.
TV shows here love to portray NYC as a Gotham-esque hellscape because that makes for good police procedurals, but in reality I'd bet if you invented some kind of metric comparing TV portrayals of violent crimes against actual violent crime stats NYC would have the largest gap between fiction and reality.
Don't get me wrong, horrific stuff happens here. There are millions upon millions of people, some of them awful to others. But by the numbers its safer than almost every other major metro in the country, and solidly middle of the pack among comparable global mega-cities.
It's because NYC was very dangerous from 60s-90s, and the US is still stuck appealing to Boomers. They also might've picked it up by copying older shows - even if you're too nerdy to watch TV, "NYC is dangerous" is the whole message of Batman.
