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Notes -
Ooh, I'll volunteer to be a silly nut!
WWII military fatalities in the European theater were around 15 million; something like 3.5 million of those were from small arms. (far more were from "guns" as a whole, but I'll spot you that unstated distinction, while still retaining the stated distinction between "gun violence" and other killing)
In the 80 years since WW2, the USA has had around 2.5 million suicides and homicides from small arms (mostly suicides, which IMHO are generally bad but not as bad as homicides, but again we'll stick with "gun violence" in general), roughly proportional to the population difference.
Europe's way lower on the gun suicide and homicide rates (maybe 0.5 million cases in the same time frame), but it's only fair to add that to the total, as well as maybe a hundred thousand from small arms in Russia/Ukraine/Chechnya/Yugoslavia/etc. wars., which probably (there are wide error bars on a lot of these numbers) puts them over the line to "worse". (within that time frame, but try to extend the time frame back and you aren't going to reach parity before you reach WWI)
There's room to argue for days over whether "small-arms violence is worse in Europe" is the right question to debate to inform policy, or what question would be most meaningful instead, but I just find it darkly ironic that when we reach for two of the most pro-European metrics we can think of, the one of greater magnitude may not technically be pro-European! Same energy as when I first learned that the most deadly mass shooting (of non-soldiers) in the US was a gun confiscation gone wrong.
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