Gun ownership and violent thinking.

Editor,

A Canadian gentleman in conversation earlier today wondered whether weapons are so deeply rooted in American culture because the US took up arms and fought a war of independence to dissociate itself from England.

Canada was also a British colony, but it gradually drifted away from England rather than to have fought a war to gain its independence, and Canadians are not particularly interested in owning weapons aside from ones that might be used to hunt.

I explained that the rationale for the 2nd Amendment was that the American founders feared that a standing army could be used against the citizenry, much as the British army was, and preferred to defend the newly independent nation with militias, citizen soldiers who would each keep a weapon in his home.

My Canadian friend took that as confirmation that the fear and violent assumptions underlying Americans' imagined need for guns does indeed stem from the fact that the US was born as an independent nation in the Revolutionary War, stamping gun ownership and violent thinking in the national psyche.