The thing is, some people need guns. The US is so vast that North Dakota is completely different from New Jersey. In North Dakota, you could be living on a 50 square mile cattle ranch, and you have to protect hundreds or thousands of cattle from predators. If a pack of wolves jumps your fences and starts to attack your cattle, what are you going to do without a gun to protect them? Yell at the wolves? Use a bow and arrow? Those predators are literally destroying your livelihood. The cops, game warden, or Department of Fish and Wildlife aren't going to come to your rescue. You're on your own.

What if you live in Alaska out in the wilderness and a 600 pound Kodiak bear shows up on your property looking for food? Are you going to let it destroy your car, food supply and possibly harm your family?

People in these areas "live off the land", they fish, they farm and they hunt wild game to stay alive. They don't go to supermarkets and pick up packaged food and bring it home, they slaughter and prepare it themselves or else they starve. Guns are a necessity for them, using anything else isn't efficient.

In New Jersey, even in the most rural places, you only 5-10 miles or so from civilization. In more populated areas people feel that they need guns for protection from other people because the police forces largely suck in this country. If someone breaks into your house, it could take the cops 10 minutes to get to you. Are you supposed to let them do what they want while you're waiting for the cops or do you draw down on them as soon as they break in and say "GTFO or die"?

My parents live in a larger city in South Jersey with a few acres of land (3 houses in a row), my dad owns a few guns and is known in the neighborhood to go outside at night if he hears something unusual with a pistol stating "come out and get shot or get the fuck out of here." A few years ago about 5 houses on our street were broken into, they hit houses on either side of my parents three houses, but didn't touch any of the three they own. I wonder why... 😉

These are real things people have to worry about here. Europeans (and others outside of the US) simply don't realize how gigantic and diverse the US is. Watch Yellowstone if you want a sense of what it's like living out in the rural Midwest, or Life Below Zero which is a reality TV show about people living in or below the Arctic Circle.

The problem is that you can't say "only people that live in the wilderness can have guns" because it's written into our constitution that we can own guns (well, technically, it says we have a right to form a militia, but I digress...) and that isn't easy to change. It's a big problem without an easy solution.