Odin, my point was not about how many guns a person should have or how many rounds they should fire. I am not enough of a gun expert to even propose something like that. I was trying to explore why we in the US think so differently about guns compared to people in other similar countries.
Canada is not very different from the US. It has big cities, isolated rural areas, drug problems, property crime and so on, just like in the US. Canadians are hunters and people there have gun collections. But they do not have a widespread legal right to own a firearm, especially not handguns. They could change their laws to allow for that, but they don't. They don't seem to feel the need for everyone to have a gun (or several) for protection.
In many countries, there is more of a sense that people are connected to others in their community. The same gun control problem comes up in discussions about national health insurance, about taxes, about paying for roads. We will do things that might make sense on an individual level, but that don't make sense for the whole country. We will do things that hurt ourselves in the long run to keep other people--in our own country-- from getting something we think they don't deserve.
What is a slam-dunk in most countries (everyone is better off if we all have health care or we will get shot less if we don't all have guns) becomes a contentious "me and mine against those other people" fight in the US. I remember reading the international press during Hurricane Katrina, and people in other countries were amazed by the caustic comments they heard about the victims, and that the US president himself did not seem very concerned about his citizens being swept away or dying unattended in parking lots.
On the other hand, there was worldwide mourning after the 9/11 attacks in the US. The French headline said "Today, we are all Americans." I can't imagine a US paper saying anything similar about a terrorist attack in another country, because we would not want to read such a thing. As many people as died on 9/11 have been killed in foreign countries, and it makes hardly a blip on our radar. Who cares about people so far away and so different from us?
In the US we think of ourselves as separate individuals only responsible for ourselves and our own families. It could be that the US is so large and diverse that a rancher in Montana really does not feel any connection to kids in New York-- and vice versa. If I want a gun (or several) for my own reasons, I should not have to concern myself with how that decision might affect anyone else. And the "gun fails" where we kill and hurt each other by accident or stupidity or negligence or anger are the result.
