Okay, first thing's first: if you're going to tout outdated or outright disproven scientific ideas, why not use them that are actually fun? Geocentricism, phlogiston, the idea that the moon is a gets eaten by a pig every two weeks. Hell, spontaneous generation- you can get more mileage out of that than you'd believe, if you put in a little effort. This weird idea that the infinite sex-obsession ideas of Freud still hold water is ludicrous; let's let the nineteenth-century ideas go, okay? And let's not kid ourselves into thinking this is really about guns. On a per capita basis, both the Swiss and the pre-US-invasion Afghans have far more than we do. They also have far fewer mass shootings and violent riots, but that's the point- this is about cultural criticism of guns and their place in US society. That's fine; no shortage of subjects for discussion there, but let's be honest about it.
Now, despite sharing (most of) a common language with the UK and a big chunk of the rest of the world, the US is really quite different. If you try to judge a country by the cultural standards of another group of countries with wildly different social, political, and economic realities, of course it's going to fall short. If we judge the nations of western Europe based on how well they expended money, lives, and political capital to defend areas far outside their own borders from Russian and Chinese aggression during the Cold War, only a handful of them fair better than "failing miserably" (and while you could very legitimately raise the question of who's defending against American aggression, this post is already going to be long enough). They didn't need to do better, though; the new (and far bigger) kid on the block was there to do it for them. If we judge them by the amount they're willing to structure their economies to incentivize research and development of new drugs, medical procedures, and testing protocols, thereby allowing medical care in their countries to advance beyond the eighteenth century, well... Head on over to the US and walk it, coast to coast. How many Thalidomide babies do you see? It's easy to afford a nationalized system of essentially free healthcare when you're not paying for every drug that fails to meet the decade-long, 2% success rate of FDA approval testing. And it's easy to do that
and stay modern when there's someone else to foot the bill.
If we judge them by the standards of good old fashioned American-style self-obsession, on the other hand, they do just fine; they'll insist that Europe and Asia are separate continents, in spite of centuries of direct evidence, physical proximity, and the existence of maps. The inhabitants of the UK even cheerfully refer to the mainland of Europe as "the Continent", ignoring the facts that 1. Europe's not a continent and 2. if it was, it wouldn't be
"the Continent"; that would be Asia. They'll sometimes refer to the inhabitants of the US as "colonials" despite two centuries and two notable wars demonstrating otherwise. If that's not quite on the level as calling yourself an "American", thereby implying that the entire rest of two continents apparently don't count, it's still pretty close, so we do at least have that in common.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point. Saying the US is overly armed by the standards of pretty much anywhere else on Earth is like saying an elephant is overly multicellular by the standards of an amoeba. That said, is the borderline gun-worship that seems so prevalent to the outside world actually warranted by modern American life? Of course not. But "modern" by US standards is a much smaller timeframe than it is for most places; remember that old joke about Americans thinking that a hundred years is a long time and Europeans thinking that a hundred miles is a long way? It's not actually a joke. There was a time, no longer within living memory but not far from it, when that gun-worship was wholly appropriate. Is it clung to as an out-of-date idea that could still easily go horribly wrong and destroy someone's life? Sure. But a list of the same things that other nations have and do would take all day, and I've gone on long enough, so I'll close with a simple observation:
Here in the US, guns kill people. In the rest of the world, soccer kills people.
DoPo said:
So by the time we roll around to the 18th century, guns weren't really "exclusive" any more but pretty much expected in a conflict. As such, brandishing in battle shouldn't really be considered special. Now, if the newly born USA used swords, or halberds, or, dunno, maybe corkscrews, then that would have been noteworthy. Guns? Maybe if it was a very specific gun - like a particular model of a handgun or a rifle that was predominantly used for whatever reason. That's not the case - it's just guns in general. Sure, they might have been the main weapons used but they were also the main weapons used by everybody else at the time. You may as well claim that walking on your feet is a very key part of 's history because at all major events the residents have done that.
It's not about guns, specifically, it's about armed-ness (and by extension, preparedness) in general. It's not practical for a typical person to have a jet fighter or even a machine gun sitting around at home, but a shotgun or rifle? That's a different matter.
