Why Americans think it is right to own guns?
After mass shootings killed 12 moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado, and six Sikh worshippers in Wisconsin this summer, it may seem a little bizarre that many Americans insist people have the right an inalienable right to buy a gun that can spit 60 bullets per second.
Yet it is such a deep part of the culture that no event, not these murders or the more ordinary 11,500 other firearm-related homicides that take place every year in the US, not to mention that 17,500 gun-related suicides, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, can dislodge
the notion that the ownership of more than 300 million guns makes us safer.
The belief in guns is so strong that solution to gun-related murders is often imagined to be more guns. For example, even after a
horrific campus shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007 that resulted in 32 deaths, some politicians pointed to the university's campus-wide gun ban as a contributing factor, on the theory that the problem wasn't that the unbalanced student came to school with two semi-automatic weapons but that students and faculty weren't themselves armed. Nor were they alone: a national student group of over 15,000 members formed asking to overturn laws restricting the use of concealed weapons on campus.
The Right Stuff
The legal foundation of this madness is the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which reads "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
That might not sound like a blanket right to bear arms, and it wasn't intended as such. Fearful of European-style standing armies, the authors of the amendment believed that citizen militias were the only way to prevent tyranny, according to historian Saul Cornell, writing in his 2006 book A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America. Cornell concluded in his study that they saw the amendment as more of a guarantee of a civic obligation than a personal right.
In fact, it's so hard to read as a personal right that it wasn't until 2010 that the Supreme Court successfully overcame the text and with no equivocation ruled that the second amendment meant people had a personal right to keep and bear arms, unconnected to military service.
The truth is that the right to gun ownership is much more securely fixed in our hearts than in our laws and in recent years, a triumph of the well-organised and well-funded pro-gun lobby. In 1959, when Gallup first asked the question, 60% of people favoured a general handgun ban. Asked recently, it's fallen to 26% a record low. True, more people support a ban on semiautomatic weapons 53% but gun ownership remains high:
47% say they have a gun in their house.
How did this happen? There is a residual love of guns that is a legacy of pioneer days and among rural people, a reflection of an attachment to hunting. Certainly, some people do hunt a few kids I grew up with out in Oregon hunted. My best friend in junior high would always gnaw on homemade venison for his lunch salty gray-green stuff that had the consistency of rope.
Every year, a hunters' club offered a hunter's safety course in the evening, after school, which were lectures you needed to pass to get your hunting licence but the course always sounded a bit boring, like becoming a Boy Scout, and hunting itself was more a hobby some families had, like going to church, not a subject everyone thought about or talked about.
But hunting is not really what's behind the still-growing love of guns. President Obama, as candidate Obama in 2008, in a rare moment of accidental candour once described the residents of dying industrial towns in the Midwest as bitter people who "cling to guns or religion". Although he later recanted, he was right to a certain extent. At the same time, he also missed the point:
in the US, guns have become a kind of religion in themselves. 'Power'
In May, 24-year-old James Holmes, a failing University of Colorado student, started buying guns. He bought four guns at Denver-area gun shops, including a 12-gauge Remington 870 Express Tactical shotgun, a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 semi-automatic rifle, and a Glock 22 handgun.
Around the same time, Holmes also began ordering bullets and body armour online reportedly over 50 packages, according to newspaper accounts. On July 20, he bought a ticket for the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises Again, the latest Batman saga. Then about 20 minutes into the movie, went out to his car, girded himself up with his arsenal, came back and started shooting.
Clint Eastwood once said he made his violent movies to give people hope, imagining a young guy who has a job, maybe cleaning swimming pools, and has no sense of hope for the future.
Why Americans think it is right to own guns? - Economic Times
. Even if russia had so much oil/ gas and natural resources, they suffered so big fall in between 1990 to 1999. but what about US and EU, they dont have oil/ gas to sell to support their economy if they face any fall? where will they stop if they will face a real deep recession? 
