Here's why.

First. Guns are an extremely profitable business, and even more so in hard economic times, when everybody is paranoid about (or eager to participate in) crime and civil unrest. And now that the market is saturated with weaponry, it has to expand to new customers, and more exotic products.

Like all profitable businesses, they have a strong and well-funded propaganda arm, a trade association, dedicated to getting more people to buy more and better product, and to combat threats to that trade. They also work mightily to get more consumers interested in their wares. They do this by generating a need for their product through propaganda, and by using political bribes to influence politicians to support their activities.

Maybe because of this, their consumers, Americans, are culturally obsessed with guns. They enjoy playing with them and fantasizing about blowing away their enemies with them. The gun is their solution to every problem. Hollywood has pounded this in with films like "The Deep Six" and innumerable Westerns where the pansy milquetoast hero finally grows a pair and blows away his foes with manly gunfire. Have you noticed how in the "Mummy" movies (the ones with Brendan Fraser) guns are used to kill ghosts? Can you think of anything more useless than a firearm when trying to eliminate a dead person? Then there are the Zombie flicks...

By the time an American kid is 10 years old he knows (or thinks he knows), how to hold a gun, shoot it, load it, the whole goddamn manual of arms before he grows his first curly little pube! He is an expert on the effects of gunfire, ballistic data, and other battlefield minutia. The only thing he doesn't know is the pitiful, pathetic totally stomach-turning awful squeal a strong, full-grown man is capable of making when his body is violated by a hot fast piece of metal. I've heard that sound, (I was present at the scene of an accident), and I never want to hear it again, ever. It doesn't sound at all like when you get shot in the movies.

Why just Americans? I don't know. Canadians are not that different from us, culturally. Why we should differ so much in this aspect baffles me. No doubt there is some noble constitutional reason for it, but I've read the constitution and Ill be damned if I can find it.