This is why there will never be gun control in the States. Americans are constantly immersed in a culture that constantly portrays guns as a method of solving problems, when in fact guns essentially cause the problems in the first place. US TV, movies, books, all show situations where the good guy uses a gun to permanently erase a bad guy and the problems he brings (although no one seems to notice that the same bad guys keep coming back, just like real life). Outside the US, people who attempt to solve problems with firearms aren’t lauded for it to the same degree as they are in the US. In America, gun ownership is a sign of masculinity, like owning a powerful car or having oversized junk. Allowing compromise is 'being servile and submissive', and makes one worthless, when every civilization is actually built by working together. That's a hard thing to overcome.
Again with these tired generalizations, over-simplifications, stereotypes, and straw-men? It's like saying people who own cars must think that life is like "Fast and the Furious." and calling someone a "reckless street racer" just for owning a car. What are these "problems" you believe that Americans think are "solved" with a gun? Of all the gun owners that I've known, none had this sort of Rambo mentality you presume they have. I've mentioned the following on here numerous times, but I guess it bears repeating; I grew up in quiet, friendly communities where practically every house-hold owned firearms, yet violent crime, especially gun related crime, was non-existent. I've had friends and family who've owned guns, yet none who fit the slur "gun-nut", which has been tossed at anyone who happens to support the second amendment. Everyone had always been responsible and low-key regarding the guns they've owned, occasionally taking them out to go hunting or target practice. Yet their mere ownership of guns somehow contributes to violent crime going down in the gang-ridden ghettos. Not to digress, but that is another subject that annoys me; people who criticize hunting as inhumane and barbaric yet still consume meat as if industrial slaughterhouses were somehow less barbaric and more humane.
Anyway, you have two viewpoints, one on the inside informed by direct knowledge and personal experience, and one on the outside informed through a narrow, skewed window via a biased, sensationalized media.Things get distorted and misrepresented by knee-jerk hysteria. Should people who own kitchen cutlery be shamed for crimes that have involved stabbings? Perhaps it's this culinary culture that fosters and facilitates violent knife attacks? See how silly that sounds? But that might sound totally reasonable to a culture where kitchen cutlery is a foreign thing and their own exposure to knives is exclusively through gruesome stories of slashings and stabbings in a faraway land.
Also, we already have compromise, called licensing and regulation, which still allows responsible, law-abiding citizens the freedom to own a useful tool, rather than a complete ban.
