America has the biggest hard on for guns of any country by far. You own half of the world’s guns. Guns are far too romanticised and readily available there. You can buy a gun at a department store ffs. Look at the hysterical resistance to stricter laws regarding screening and gun availability every time it's brought up. The NRA has far too much power and influence. Seeing gun ownership as a right because of the 2nd amendment has warped your attitude to guns to the point that you’ve lost all perspective. This 'if only all the good guys had guns we'd all be safe' rhetoric just leads to more and more guns. It's completely absurd from the outside looking in.
HBB is responding sufficiently to the statistics side of things so I won't double up on that. Australia is in no way comparable to the US other than that both used to be British colonies.
I don't see how being able to buy a gun at a department store = gun culture. To begin with, especially now, all one can typically buy at a "department store" are bolt action rifles or shotguns. Still lethal of course, but no one can walk out of Walmart with a Matrix-invading-the-building-Morpheus-was-being-kept-in setup.
I'll agree with you that Hollywood sells people on BIG BOOM POW POW visions of guns, but American movies sell well globally, and those movies are produced by Democrats, so I don't see how that's something specific to the US or to a "gun culture" here.
Only an estimated 35% of American households have guns, with only an estimated 20% of Americans owning guns (ie, the wife doesn't have one but the husband does). Something like half the guns are owned by 3% of those 20%. I don't know what the median number is, so the average is skewed by the previous statistic, but the average number per gun owner is eight guns. Gun ownership per household or per person has been dropping for decades, but guns per gun owner has been increasing. Gun culture has been on the decline if we measure by households with guns, or number of individual gun owners, but affluence and the proliferation of new gun technologies has allowed people who do enjoy guns to have more options. Now, within the last 2-3 years there has been an uptick in the amount of background checks, but those could be for existing gun owners.
Despite the decline in individual gun ownership, based on these estimates of owners, gun crime in the entire US is committed by approximately .0001% of gun owners. The fraction of guns used in crimes is approximately .00003%. If we zoom in on certain locales in the US though, that number can morph dramatically in either direction. In short, I don't see any backing for a national "culture issue". There's definitely a gang culture problem in some areas, which is a different problem with different solutions.
The point about the NRA or the 2nd amendment are separate issues. The NRA is a lobby that works for the interests of its members. They are not an independent monolith. They lose power as soon as they lose the guarantee of translating their endorsement into votes and/or contributions. That is how lobbying works. As for the 2nd Amendment: The US was birthed in part due to civilian ownership of weaponry, and so the continued protection of civilian ownership of weaponry was written into its founding document as an immutable right. That's a powerful cultural artifact. That it looks odd to a people without that tradition isn't curious, and doesn't make those people possessing of some sort of special insight.
