@firefly,
....fear of gun violence? ... commonplace in America?... you saying America is like a battlefield?
I thought America only created battlefields in third world countries to selfishly horde resources.
I must be blind and deaf when I leave my home because I have never encountered gun violence first hand. Have you?
I think I know what your problem is. The problem with you is that you and a minority of the people in America see a gun and picture columbine, gangsters, accidental child suicide etc. And most of the Europeans think like that, frankly, this is why so many nosy Europeans idiotically think we have gone all completely insane.
The fact of the matter is that these things are rare relative to the whole picture (sure some may get more attention than others), however, are not a product of the existence of the gun, rather the idiocy of those who choose to either 1) Misuse them for heinous purposes 2) are irresponsible fools who do not lock them up when not to use, and such they are seen to be people who are unfit to handle firearms, and 3) people who act stupidly around guns and cost many people their rights as they pertain to weapons. For example, the police shooting of a Los angeles boy who was drawing an airsoft gun on a cop. the knee-jerk reaction was not to educate the public about the dangers of having airsoft games in public areas without notifying the police, or about brandishing anything looking like a weapon in public, but it was to introduce a bill to paint arisoft guns bright colors. An obvious counter-argument to this bill is that a criminal can just paint his gun a bright color, and brightly colored guns do exist (for example pink walther and other handguns are available for sale). Sadly, while we are not living in the wild west, we are, by no means, living in a totally safe and violence-free society, and to adequately protect oneself, one must have the tools to do so. I like guns. I enjoy shooting them, cleaning them, studying them, hunting with them, etc. I am not religious, homophobic, or bigoted, in fact i am openly agnostic. Sadly stereotypes will exist everywhere, and our culture is becoming such, and that declaring an interest in firearms can be seen as weird and socially unacceptable. Guns are inanimate objects, and should be treated as such. Yes they are dangerous, but only when misused.
We can argue hypotheticals and call each other names all day, but when you get down to it, numerous government studies, and even the Harvard law school study I posted earlier, have shown a negative correlation between gun ownership rates and violent crime rates, to conclude that more people that own guns in an area, the less crimes occur.
