If the United States could coexist without firearms, they would. It's not about the 2nd amendment anymore, which was created at a time when the country was still expecting a second war with the United Kingdom (which indeed happened 36 years later), when militias were law enforcement because the police didn't exist, and people had single-action fire weapons like muskets and long-barreled black powder rifles as weapons.
Now it's because we're scared. We're scared of gangs of black men burning our businesses down when some thug gets tazed by a cop and dies; we're scared of people breaking into our homes and stealing our shit or killing our families; we're scared of the Left coming out in the streets again and blocking traffic, hitting us with sticks, threatening us (like antifa did in Portland to some old people lately, all on video), and we're frankly making our peace with the idea that another civil war is coming the moment another 9/11 happens, a dirty bomb goes off in a major city, or the President passes a constitutional amendment or major law that somehow foments unrest on the Left which causes them to rebel against us. We need weapons to protect ourselves from each other, not to stop foreign invaders or give them to a militia (as much as those folks are the backbone of the country's last line of defense, many of them volunteering their time to patrol the border with BP, CBP and ICE).
