This is the inevitable outcome of the combination of the proliferation of guns in the US + the over-the-top fearmongering of certain high-profile personalities (specifically on the right). It was never going to end any other way.
Scare people into thinking everyone is out to get them and tell them they have to arm themselves, and you get tragedies like this: the guy that shot a teenaged girl through his front door when she was looking for help. This kid shot in the face looking for a place to take pictures.
People like Tucker Carlson and all similar scaremongers (too many to name) are partly to blame for this. I’m old enough to remember the red scare, where average people thought communists were hiding in every suburban neighbourhood, and also the satanic panic – this is all that but on steroids.
Everyone isn’t out to get you. They never were. But people are becoming millionaires by riling people into killing each other *for no reason *, and unlike back then, now everyone is armed and convinced to shoot first like every place is the fucking OK Corral.
e: and to add a layer of irony, yes, Wild West high-noon shootouts are the same kind of myth-sayings as boiling frogs – pretty much all old west towns required you to surrender your guns to the sheriff on entry. Things were actually safer back then.
As someone who grew up near those wild west towns and have a lot of roots out here, yeah it’s a myth, most people I knew growing up didn’t even hunt, and most hunters I knew owned two guns tops and it WASN’T their personality, inviting you over to eat venison was their personality.
I spent a lot of my childhood in Arizona, and we did field trips in school to ‘ghost towns’ (e: the old west towns), Montezuma’s Castle (back when you could actually walk through it before vandals ruined it for everyone), and Pueblo ruins with indigenous living history reenactors.
I never even saw a modern gun in person until I was 16. It just wasn’t a thing. And yet we managed to survive.
Yeah, grandmother grew up in a family that had been poor farmers outwest, and midwest for a long time. They had like 10 guns, but that is because there was one rifle per person over the age of 12, plus a couple shotguns. Not for like having a shoot-out, but for killing problematic predators. Only my great grandfather had a hand gun, and he only had that because it was a gift from someone he did a bunch of work for. He rarely took it out of the box.
