Europe is known for having much tighter gun control laws than the United States. This is a fact. It’s also one that the media loves to hold up to try and paint us as backward hicks clinging to our guns and whatever else they want to blast this week.

However, as we’ve pointed out, laws will not stop bad people from doing bad things. A recent example comes to us from Belgium where a terrorist released from prison just hours earlier, the place where he was radicalized, murdered two police officers with their own guns.

This is the moment Belgian special forces took down a gunman who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he shot and killed two policewomen and a 22-year-old trainee teacher.

After carrying out three brutal murders this morning, the attacker took a female cleaner hostage in a nearby high school.

The footage shows him running out of the school with two guns blazing before he was shot dead in the street. Several officers were injured in the gun battle.

The man, who is understood to have been on a day release from a nearby prison, had approached the female officers at around 10.30am, slashed their throats and stabbed them several times from behind, before disarming them.

He has been named as 36-year-old Benjamin Herman. His victims have been named as police officers Lucile Garcia, 45, and Soraya Belkacemi, 53, and 22-year-old Cyril Vangriecken, who was shot dead sitting in a parked car with his mother.

Tonight Liège police paid tribute to their two fallen colleagues on Facebook, calling them ‘wonderful’ mothers and officers.

A lawmaker revealed Belgian national Herman was on an anti-terror police watchlist after being radicalised in jail. He appeared indirectly in security reports on radicalised people and was a multiple repeat offender incarcerated since 2003 who was on day release when he attacked.

And, of course, no one could have helped these officers because the entire population is effectively disarmed.

However, let’s think for a moment. The killer murdered the two officers and got their guns, but what if he’d just disappeared only to pop up in some crowd where he could have reeked havoc. People are lucky this only claimed three lives.

Yet through that, we see once again the reality that bad people will do everything they can to get their hands on guns so they can do bad things. This terrorist sure as hell did, and you’re an idiot if you don’t think someone else is watching this and thinking, “That’s how I’ll get a gun.”

Gun laws will never stop this kind of person. Laws mean nothing to these people, so going around them to get a gun means nothing to them. They’ll kill to get guns, after all. If they’ll do that, what else will they do?

Instead, all that happens is that regular folks who might be willing to step in and try and stop such an attack are disarmed. They’re prevented from acting to help their fellow man or woman because the law wants to treat them like criminals.

It’s a shame. It really is.