I’d suspect that it is the attitude of many if not most urban gun owners.
My brother lives way out in the boonies. My wife was rather perturbed at the number of guns on the rack (12- and 20-ga shotguns, .30-06 and a .22 rifles, and a 9mm handgun). But they’re tools, meant to do different jobs. It’s true that the job is to make a living thing into a dead thing, but sometimes out in the country, that’s a job that needs doing. Among the possible applications are:
- fill the freezer. A deer in the fall, a couple of turkeys in spring turkey season, a few ducks. Kinder and safer than factory farming, and deer overpopulation is problem where he is.
- control nuisance wildlife. Unfortunately, if creatures like raccoons have become human-habituated (you work hard to keep that from happening!) they really aren’t salvageable. Trapping and relocation doesn’t really work, so sometimes there’s no alternative but to put them down.
- home defense. There was one year that the guy had a bear sow take up residence in his tractor barn! Again, that’s a habituated animal, and not salvageable. The best thing to do with a bear with that little fear of humans is to turn her into stew and a rug, because she’s going to be a problem forever otherwise.
- comply with job requirements. He does maintenance of alarm systems, and there are calls for which the company’s contract requires an armed response. (Although, to the best of my knowledge, he’s never had his handgun out of a holster other than on a range.)
- stay in practice, so as to use the weapons safely.
In a city, you hire people to do these things. Out in the country, you perforce do many things for yourself. The inevitable outcome is that the guns are readily available to the toxic gun culture in the cities - which is a big problem!
The Europeans, for the most part, have no parallel. The US is extremely sparsely populated. I would imagine that the right solution for one place would not be right for another.
Treating it as a public health problem and letting evidence guide policy is, of course, off the table entirely, by decree. That’s the really unforgiveable point: evidence of what works and what doesn’t is simply suppressed, and the research is defunded or hushed.
