Its just ingrained in the culture, on another forum I use to visit everytime one of these shooting incidents occurred in the US the same type of thread would erupt and as always the americans would defend their gun laws to nth degree, one was even a moderator there is the most level headed, sensible, actually just plain nicest person you hope to meet online, and she was just adamant that everyone should have a gun or the right to own one and was completely and intractably in favour in the nicest way possible.
Its hopeless.
A few years ago I did a weapons course at Scottsdale gun club in Arizona, fired lots of full-auto assault rifles, pistols and a M249 - spent 2 days there, I'll admit it was ****** brilliant, but throughout the whole thing - I had this constant nagging feeling in my head that was saying "this is just totally and utterly perverse"
I remember going to the rental counter, collecting several assault rifles, one of which was an M16 (you're supervised with full-autos) but everything else I was just left alone with, walking around in public with flight-cases full of guns, it was... surreal, cool, but also a total culture shock for me - even as someone who used to do competitive archery, and field-target air-rifle shooting, as cool as it was - the whole thing was totally alien to me.
TLDR; The cultures are just different, part of me doesn't care - if they want guns, then have guns, but it seems ridiculous for them to suffer these gun related tragedies on a weekly basis - then appear on the television saying; "omg why is this happening, blame mental health, blame COD etc"
