France also has very strong gun controls. It is of course, more complicated than that. And, by the way, a man shot and killed 12 people in the UK in 2010 with legally held rifles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings
France's gun controls are looser than the UK's, but more importantly they don't have a defensible border. Laws are one thing: successful implementation of them is something quite different. The EU has a very weak border in general and especially once former eastern bloc countries joined Schengen, stockpiles of former Soviet weapons overnight went from one side of the border to the other.
mike_hearn|10 years ago