Originally Posted by
iris lilies
"Peace loving Europeans" my ass.
Each time we go to Europe we are steeped in the history of recent wars. We see Leftover armature, geographical boundaries newly drawn to give spoils to the victors, brutal regimes that stomp on the people. We havent even traveled near the carnage of Bosnia.
OK.. you and Tybee got me there. Now that I'm thinking about it, there was also the Armenian genocide, not to mention the Eastern Europe messes that IL mentioned, and of course, Hitler. Never mind.
I did look up "history of gun love" and learned that American gun love is a cultural thing having been borne out of the use of guns in militia during the Revolutionary War, self-preservation during frontier days, and glorification of guns through in entertainment, literature, and eventually movies and TV.
Closely related to the militia tradition was the frontier tradition with the need for a means of self-protection closely associated with the nineteenth century westward expansion and the American frontier. There remains a powerful central elevation of the gun associated with the hunting/sporting and militia/frontier ethos among the American Gun Culture.[2] Though it has not been a necessary part of daily survival for over a century, generations of Americans have continued to embrace and glorify it as a living inheritance—a permanent element of the nation's style and culture.[3] In popular literature, frontier adventure was most famously told by James Fenimore Cooper, who is credited by Petri Liukkonen with creating the archetype of an 18th-century frontiersman through such novels as The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1840).[4]
. Wikipedia
So my point about being part of our cultural DNA may still be true. But I still don't understand why gun ownership gets a completely free pass.