To hear your average gun control advocate tell it, America is rife with problems simply because we don’t restrict guns enough.

If you ask them what restrictions they want, they’ll probably start with the usual talking points, but if you press, they’ll probably talk about the gun control schemes you’ll find in other nations like Australia or the UK.

But France is another potential place they might point to. After all, it’s a nation with heavy gun restrictions beyond what most Americans would tolerate here and now.

To defend this, they’d argue that France doesn’t have the crime problem the United States has.

And that’s true. They don’t. But let’s also not pretend that France doesn’t have an issue with criminals. In fact, we typically don’t see jailbreaks like this on American soil.

Breitbart News reported that four gunmen in two cars ambushed a convoy of government vehicles transporting a convicted criminal from court back to prison in France on Tuesday morning.

The gunmen, who attacked commando-style, killed two officers, wounded three others, and were able to jailbreak 30-year-old Mohamed Amra.

France’s Le Parisien noted that Amra’s street name is “The Fly.” Amra is “described as being at the head of a narcotics network” and is also believed to have attempted a jailbreak last week.

The French National Office for the Fight against Organized Crime described the firearms used in Tuesday’s attack as “weapons of war.”  This is quite an observation when one considers that French gun controls place special restrictions on semi-automatic firearms and completely bans civilian ownership of fully automatic firearms.

The University of Sydney’s former GunPolicy.org described French gun laws as “restrictive,” not simply due to their intense regulation and all-out bans of certain kinds of weapons but also because of their rules for acquiring guns that are government-approved.

Also noted in that piece is that in order to get a gun, one must show a good reason to have it, and then you have to undergo a background check that looks at not just your criminal record but your mental health and health records as well, all to get a permit so you can buy only a small handful of firearm types.

That’s an outright invasion of privacy. 

While some in the US want either mental health evaluations or mental health records considered, the idea of your health records as well probably goes beyond what most people would consider acceptable.

Hell, some people want a gun because their health isn’t good enough to try and fend off an attacker without a firearm. In France, that’s not going to happen apparently.

Then again, in France, gun control keeping guns out of the hands of criminals doesn’t happen, either.

These are “weapons of war” that aren’t remotely permitted to the average French citizen. What’s more, France is surrounded by other countries with similar levels of gun control. There are no lawful purchases in one nation being smuggled into France, for the most part.

Yet as Breitbart’s A.W.R. Hawkins notes, this isn’t exactly the first time we’ve seen “weapons of war” in bad guys’ hands. Two previous terrorist attacks, for example, are also still fresh enough in our minds.

So yeah, the idea that gun control works should have been shattered forever. Unfortunately, anti-gunners tend to not look at reality all that much when pushing their anti-gun fantasies as viable solutions to violent crime and mental health issues.