My Grandmother was a Texan and gave me my first rifle at age 8 in 1956

So, I understand a lot about Texas traditions in this sense regarding guns and rifles in particular. The whole idea which you saw a lot in the 1950s still was that if your parents or those taking care of you gave you a .22 rifle they were trusting you to protect all members of the family with it even if you died doing this. 

So, basically if you were given a gun then the family expected you to die if necessary protecting the family. IT had already been this way for at least 400 years here in the U.S. an possibly in Europe before that. Not sure about european traditions regarding Guns only American ones and the one's I'm the most familiar with were mostly from around Colorado to California still in the 1950s.

One of the reasons for this is the law might be 50 to 100 miles away from you. So, by the time you called the law (without telephones everywhere like now) you were often dead. So, every member of your family needed to have access to a rifle or pistol then to protect the family from people or bears or mountain lions or whatever it was. Because it might be tomorrow or never before you got a lawman there between 1850 and 1960. So, the tradition was you armed boys by age 8 to 10 to defend the family from whatever it was that came against it. This was just the harsh reality of the times.

And this didn't begin to start changing really until the Viet Nam war ended in the 1970s to something else.

Mother's got very safety conscious regarding their children and infantalized boys and girls to the point where we are now which isn't good. 

There is a reason why you taught boys and some girls to protect the family even back then and there is a reason why we had 400 years of tradition regarding all this. And from my point of view things haven't really changed a lot since then.

In other words people didn't shoot up 50 to 100 people in the 1950s because someone armed (anyone) would have shot them before they got very far. People were different then in that they just wouldn't put up with someone shooting 50 or 100 people without shooting that person themselves. This is just the way it was more then from the 1950s and before. And this was accepted as the way things were done (at least west of Colorado or so.