You know Parker, I may have been too quick to signal agreement there. I'm not convinced by the usual cultural-historical argument.
There are so many examples of nation-states whose ethnic groups have been in conflict for thousands of years. Why are their gun crime rates so low compared to the USA? (why I wonder why 
)
Look at Europe. Before WWII ended, it was basically one endless battlefield since time immemorial. I read a statistic recently which said that the forty-six years between the end of WWII and the start of the Yugoslav conflicts was the longest time period in which Europe was at peace.
Mind-boggling isn't it?
I think the cultural-historical explanation of America's attitude towards guns is what the media use to deflect attention from their own role in the whole sordid mess.
What you reference is battlefield. Europe has had a lot of battles...but they were armies, or people drafted in the armies, and the bullshit of monarcies---Americans have a certain hatred for those, and them "telling us what to do". When you get right down to it, it's a mixture of things---culture, Rights, history, this is woven together into our fabric of being. Red, red, red. Look at every other former colony of Britian, they either speak with a quasi-English accent or are loyal to the queen. Americans are like "eff that", so it goes beyond guns.
When you come across the ocean to a hostile land, and have a us vs them mentality with a lot of the "locals", when you believe in Manifest Destiny, when you believe in those English Pricks over there want to tell us what to do, and tax us without representation...and so on, and so forth, plus the fact that in the biginning we had militias, a bunch of rag tag group of people who had guns for hunting and protection, it starts the formulation of a certain "recipe", all you need is to change it up a little bit, and even the best apple pie can tuen out different.
And let's not start with the conquest of Latin America...
