why (some) Americans love their guns

Another mass shooting. More broken lives.
“When will it end?” people ask, followed by a barrage against the NRA. Let me make it perfectly clear that I do not agree with the National Rifle Association in the USA – I do not agree with the right for individuals to bear arms, just because it is a right …but I also know, from nine years living in the USA that those who do think it is their right are often not stupid and definitely not evil.
There are lunatics in every constituency, of course but there is a deep seated part of every American psyche which says “I have the right…..” ,  it is a proud birth right and guns have become so much a part of what it is to be American in many, many people’s minds that it is not as simple as stupidity.
Gun control is not going to be about an overnight change of mind, but a change of culture. Whilst the slightly old fashioned idiom that you do not mess with a Texas girl “‘cos her Daddy’s give her a pistol to keep under her pillow” is certainly distasteful, there is something there that reveals a deeply defensive cultural norm.
Constitutional historians and lawyers are not even clear that the second amendment even refers to an individual right in relation to oneself but in an individual’s right in relation to defending a community – this is a slippery slope of a difference, of course.
And the slope has slipped to a point where semi-automatic firearms are legal in a private individuals hands. It will be a clamber to get out of that pit. Meanwhile the right wing pundits will already be writing their scripts (if they have not got them memorized) to vilify President Obama, the second he mentions gun control, as a communist plotter removing basic American freedoms.
Americans are not stupid but many tend to have some triggers and suggesting that their freedom is being removed is one of them. This is impossible for an English mind to grasp as we tend to think of our own freedom in relation to the effects we have on others. From day to day folk from England and America will behave courteously, act kindly and live in community but there are deep seated fears in the American mind and a loss of freedom and autonomy is right at the top of the list.
I was working in the next parish over from Blacksburg at the time of the Virginia Tech shooting. We drove home with the radio on and reports that the shooter was in our town (due to muddled news reports the initial assumption was the perpetrator was the boyfriend of one of the victims – a student at Radford University) – all our schools were on lock down – we could not get to our children and they vividly remember police with automatic weapons stationed outside each classroom door. Afterwards there was a lot of care needed, a lot of shock and a lot of pain.
Whilst I know all about the fallout from such an incident I cannot even begin to imagine the pain of those parents whose children will not be home this Christmas any more than I could really understand the pain of the parents whose university students never came home that semester in Virginia. I do understand that something needs to change but angry accusation is not the way to go – especially across culturally difficult waters.
I am relieved that my children do not have armed police outside their school each day any more, do not have to walk through metal detectors to get to lessons and will probably never have their class teacher run hysterical from the room again as she discovers which dorm (her daughters) have been attacked. Even England is not perfectly safe but we do not live with the same level of uncertainty here.
Like I say, I agree wholeheartedly with strict gun control, I do not think limiting personal freedom for the good of the whole society is a communist plot but I get really annoyed when we English get on a high horse about this. It is broken and shouting at it will not help.