PANTIN, France — My mother lives near Roseburg, Ore. Her part of the world isn’t often in the news in France. But when I woke up last Friday morning, the mass shooting on the Umpqua Community College campus in Roseburg had made the French morning television news. There was video of a landscape I know well, of distressed local citizens, and of President Obama delivering his solemn remarks.

Viewed from France, everything about the United States looms large. Still, the numbers the newscasters ticked off — more than 300 million guns in circulation, mass shootings occurring at a rate of nearly one per day, thousands of victims of gun-related deaths — were shocking in their magnitude.

Guns are highly regulated in France. Hunting is a popular sport, but a hunting license is required before a rifle can be purchased. Guns can be bought for use at firing ranges, but only after an application has been filed and approved by the police. All gun buyers must provide a medical certificate of mental and physical fitness to own a weapon, and all guns must be registered. It is illegal to possess military-grade weapons. That the Oregon shooter, Christopher Harper-Mercer, was equipped with five handguns, an assault rifle and several magazines of ammunition — all purchased legally — is unimaginable here.

Europe is not entirely immune from such horrific attacks. In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik set off a series of bombs in downtown Oslo before making his way to an island summer camp and shooting 69 people, mostly young people, dead. In France, one of the worst mass shootings that was not terrorist-related happened in 1995, when Éric Borel, 16, shot and killed 12 people, including three members of his own family. And massacres by terrorists with political agendas have also shattered communities in France. In 2012, Mohammed Merah shot and killed three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse and killed four men. In January, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi murdered 12 people in the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and Amedy Coulibaly, who coordinated his attacks with the Kouachi brothers, shot dead a police officer and then killed four people in a kosher supermarket in Paris.