Just to be safe, I'm going to ask everyone to answer these questions:
1) What is your name?
2) What is your quest?
3) What is your favorite color?
1) misko27. More generally, "misko" followed by a two-digit string, wherein those digits, when added together, equal a number that is more than 5 but less than 10. Recently I've adopted "Silenus" and variations on that. I also answer to "Spanish", and (more recently) "Inquisitor", although I prefer the latter (I used to go by "The Spanish Inquisitor", but everyone shortened it to "Spanish" instead of "Inquisitor".)
2) To become powerful, popular, and leave the world a better place than when I started. The Impossible Three: many are one, some are two, but few are all three.
3) Tough question; I am going with a dark blue-grey color of some sort.] I would put my vote behind
Liberty Blue, although I am tempted by
Independence Blue (which is too grey),
Air Force Blue (which is just a smidge too bright), and
Yale Blue (which is a silly name, colleges shouldn't have their own colors).
I'd add my $0.02, but honestly I've never been big on these sort of conversations, so I don't have anything to contribute other then saying comparing the EU to the US is more then a little bit silly.
Admittedly the eastern half is kinda crappy, but the west?
This though, this is right up my alley. Spoken like a true Western European, OW. "Ignoring the other half, Europe is great!". A reminder the population of
West Europe is not even close to double the US population. Did you look up the population of all of Europe and then forget to take out the population of the "crappy" parts? That's not good statistics. What if we only compared the safest 50% of US states? I bet our gun statistics would look a lot different then. But we don't do that. Either choose 100% of Europe or one individual country (I think you could argue for using either), but - and I believe this to be an unintentional mistake, mind, not that you were being dishonest - using only the parts that reflect well on your argument would be statistically deceptive even if you weren't already messing up the population numbers. If you say "European Union", then include ALL of it, or if you say, for example "France", or something, use ONLY France, but there is no reason to string together rich countries. If you include both France AND Germany AND Belgium AND the Netherlands as a coherent government, well, you also have to include Poland, and Romania, since "West Europe" isn't a single country with a standard gun law.
US statistics would probably (I'm not actually going to look that up, it's 2 AM here) look a lot better if we could just forget Tennessee exists, for example, but we can't do that in good conscience without explaining why excluding Tennessee is reasonable methodology (which might be, as a random example, Tennessee uses a different system then the rest of the country and thus cannot be included).