Sounds like a clash of perspectives to me. If you live in Western Europe you're never going to be able to see the point of view of a person living in, say, Johannesburg with the constant threat of violence and the police not really having any plan or hope of ending it. I was on the scene of a cash-in-transit robbery in Cape Town 5 minutes after it happened. A gang with AK-47s pushed a truck into the island in the highway and shot the back door off to get the cash. The drivers lived, I saw bullet casings all over the road. This event didn't make the national news, of course, since it was so unremarkable and commonplace.
In this sort of scenario one might feel that everyone has to go around with AK-47s to protect themselves from the baddies who have AK-47s. Where would the escalation stop?
I wouldn't be too surprised if there was a time in Europe when everyone who could afford them had weapons of one kind or another simply for personal protection on the roads.