For people around the world who don't understand U.S. Gun Culture

 First, you have to imagine (because it is completely true) that without the U.S. Gun culture during the Revolutionary War, America could never have existed in the first place.

To understand this, America couldn't have existed without the musket Rifle of that period. It was a tool everyone used to hunt deer and small game and to protect their homes from bad people who might want to kill or rape their families or steal the food that they grew on their farms and ranches then. So, this same tool that protected their farms and ranches also could shoot "Redcoats" or British Soldiers then and protect them from King George III's laws when they became unfair to the colonists.

So, a rifle was as useful to the colonists as a shovel to dig plants up or to plant things like a plow which could be pulled by people or oxen or horses or mules or whatever. If you look at it this way you can see that a rifle was a tool used for many things and this is how it got to here.

However, there is another factor which is a big one, especially west of the Rockies. Often, there is no law for 50 to 100 miles in any direction as you move further west. So, if (then or now) people don't have weapons to defend themselves from people who are crazy or criminals (even now) they wouldn't be alive today. 

So, people who live in big cities where there might be a policeman on most city blocks walking a beat, they might expect it to be this way everywhere (but it's not).

In the west where there are wide open spaces of 50 to 100 miles at a stretch with almost no one there, if you don't have a weapon and someone threatens you, you are simply raped or dead and that's all she wrote.

This is what people who always have lived in big cities don't really understand. It isn't really just people you need protection from but also on some occasions also wild animals you have to protect yourself from.

I don't carry a gun here in California simply because it doesn't seem necessary where I live now. However, when I lived in the mountains I always carried a large folding and locking Buck Knife not only a a tool but also for protection for whatever I might encounter. Though I'm proficient with a firearm since I was about 8 years old and trained by my father to hit anything with a .22 rifle for at least 100 yards away I think guns aren't a good idea to carry around for many different reasons. However, many people are more paranoid than I am. part of this is because I'm also 6 feet 5 inches tall and the best protection I have found is just not to smile at people if they look dangerous. This has always worked pretty well for me.

However, most people aren't as big as I am either. So, different people have different solutions to feeling safe wherever they are.