This country was pretty much wall-to-wall guns through most of its history. As Robert Heinlein said, everyone had a gun and no one needed it.

Jerry Pournelle wrote about his Depression days in a one-room school in the South when he was a boy. Rifles were brought to school, and left in the coatroom until after school, in case there was something good to eat spotted on the way home.

My grandfather's farm house had a couple of rifles propped right by the door in case of varmints. No locks, no nothing. None of us kids ever touched them, because we knew we'd be skinned alive.

When I was very little, my folks had little money. We lived in a trailer--not the kind you see in trailer parks, the little round kind you pull behind a car. A small car. We sometimes lived off of what my dad went out and shot. My mom is still sick of pheasant, which in the Midwest was pretty much the official game bird. My dad did his best to teach me to shoot, but I was a small kid, and a 12-gauge would knock me into the next county. I liked to plink cans with a .22, and that was about it. Never really developed any interest in shooting animals, but didn't begrudge anyone else doing it.

Guns owned by individuals were an important part of keeping this nation free and prosperous. And we would be a hell of a lot safer today if many more of our honest and responsible citizens carried heat, and statistics back this up.