I don’t want to harp on about this, but I am going to, probably ad-nauseam and to the detriment of my health and your mental wellbeing.
Many Americans have bought into a myth, well, several but it all stems from the myth of freedom.
To concede one inch of ground on gun control is to start to lose those freedoms. Leaving aside the nature of that freedom and whether it actually exists for a moment, how is it that reasonably intelligent people faced with mounting death rates amongst their children, which by any metric are far and above other comparable nations, still cleave to their guns at the expense of their offspring?
Well because they have been fed lies, and once swallowed and absorbed it is difficult to admit that you are the fool, and before your hackles rise, we all do it, ask someone from the UK about whether the Empire was overall a good thing, they will huff and puff about the odd badly treated native but say yes on balance we did good. If you were an industrialist or royalty then that is true, if you were a normal person, factory worker, a soldier or indeed almost any native in a third of the world, then you more than likely got fucked over and told it was for your own good. Ever since then the line has been, we bought civilization (at the end of a bayonet), peace (when you had had enough of being bayoneted) and gave it back (fucked & in turmoil).
Yanks are spoon fed the American dream the same way, in their classrooms from day one they do a pledge of allegiance, not once but just about every day, singing about the home of the brave and land of the free. Nobody else does that, other than maybe North Korea and some place back in thirties Europe.
I have heard President Bush saying that the rest of the world are jealous of US freedoms and that envy was at the root of 9/11! And people bought that enough for him to invade a country that had absolutely nothing to do with it while carry on dealing with one that very definitely did.
Hollywood pedals the US as the fighter for justice and that war is an addiction that is ideally suited to the American poor, just in case they are needed to grab some dwindling resource for the rich.
And through all this the military industrial complex hawks paranoia and distrust of not only foreigners but neighbours too, its talking head (The NRA) has stymied any and every effort, however sensible, to limit the deaths, rallying around the banner of the 2nd amendment as if the authors in times when fear of a returning UK, or a government bent on tyranny that could have been repulsed by musket wielding citizens could envisage the US killing more of its residents than all the wars since , with home owned guns, and not have been appalled and wondered what had happened to that freedom.