You ask a good question, but like many today you don't really quite follow out, to its conclusion, your own train of thought. I suspect this is because the conclusion means more mystery, and like many you want to have answers, and easy ones at that.
Modern political and social existence makes us confront the fact that what lies at the root of human behavior is trans-rational. I use the term trans-rational, rather than irrational or similar terms, because my own investigations suggest that what is involved is not irrational, but rather has a rationality that eludes us due to the fact that our thinking is missing certain fundamental factors. We see the problems, but since we don't fully understand human behavior, we can't quite put our finger on the whys and wherefores.
Clearly, as you observe, the relationship of the People of the United States of America to guns does not easily fit any normal rational analysis. But this is not the only fact of this kind with which modern life confronts us. The roots of terrorism are also trans-rational, as are the arrogance and ignorance of many national and corporate leaders.
Something other than obvious rationality is driving human behavior.
For a long time in human history this driving trans-rational reality has been called Evil. But in the age of science, with its tendency to a kind of neo-determinism based on genetic and evolutionary theories, our investigations of the problem of Evil have fallen away, left really only to traditional religious thinkers, and perhaps to artists with their imaginative exploration of human nature (e.g. George Lucas and his simplistic, but acute, meditations on the "dark side of the force").
What we really confront here is a limitation to the discipline of science. Our civilization derives its current understanding of rationality from the practices of science (evidence, abstract and cause and effect thinking, and so forth). Science, having banished "spirit" from rational consideration, has also effectively banished any wise understanding of the meaning of Good and Evil in the appreciation of human nature, and human affairs.
This is what I meant above, when I wrote: "Something other than obvious rationality is driving human behavior."
Scientific materialism, which is a paradigm that limits the understanding of reality to matter and material causes, is now seeking to explain Evil, or trans-rational human behavior, by finding in genetics, micro-biology and evolutionary psychology, especially as applied in neurophysiology and cognitive science, all manner of "rational" explanations for trans-rational behavior, which essentially leave out the idea that human beings make moral choices, choices between Good and Evil.
This is a particularly odd behavior (trans-rational behavior) on the part of scientists themselves, because in order to do this you have to completely disregard your own experience of life, and the dynamics of your own inwardness (thinking, feeling etc). The scientist looks out onto the world of the senses, finding matter and its complexities as the explanation of everything, meanwhile in complete denial of his inner life, which is entirely similar to everyone else's with all those nasty and troublesome worries and moral struggles we all share as modern human beings.
What we really have, which you notice with your questions about guns, is the absence of a common and shared language of inwardness, such that we could think and feel with clarity about the trans-rational aspects of human existence. Science has torn us away from the traditional views - namely Good and Evil, and left us essentially with nothing. Brain waves and chemical happenings in neurons do not really offer us any understanding of what we all know, and experience, that lies within our own inner natures.
The mystery then of trans-rational behavior will elude us until we take our highly developed scientific thinking and apply it in unbiased self observation (introspection). Once we do that, once we look inward with right objectivity and brutal self honesty, then and only then will we begin to understand trans-rational behavior. The secret, so to speak, is right there in front of us, within our own inwardness.
If there is a major problem, it has to do with the fact that this act of objective introspection will lead us back to the spirit, which is a conclusion about reality from which many people want to run. Having eliminated God from our rational (scientific) paradigm, there are all kinds of (trans-rational) motives for not bringing Him back. The whole thing is one of those very amusing human paradoxes that have delighted seekers of wisdom for all of human history, and which is why in the spiritual traditions of the East, the wise man (the enlightened human being) is often seen just sitting and smiling. It isn't that he is laughing at us, or his students, or even at life - he is laughing at himself for sitting there and playing the I know something you don't game, when the fact is that everyone has all that they need right there in front of them.
In the West, this same problem ends up leading back to Christ of all people, for all the same answers the East peddles via its conceptions about enlightenment, Christ speaks of in His parables, and with respect to the whole problem of Good and Evil, and the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven (the kingdom of heaven is at hand, the kingdom of heaven is within you etc.).
The fear of the trans-rational rationalist, that this will lead to submission to religious authorities, is understandable, but false. Christ never taught such a view, and neither did Gautama Buddha. The individual self is entirely capable of standing on its own intuitions in this regard - that is moral determinations lie completely within the grace given capacities of modern human beings as individuals, they need nothing from authorities.
One still has to face one's self, however. The brutal self honesty that leads to success in 12 Step programs is really essential to all of us who might want to appreciate our own trans-rational reality and nature.
This is easier than it seems. I have written about the basic problem in a little short story Bicycles: A Children's Christmas Story for Adults ; and with a bit more detail in pragmatic moral psychology all of which can be found on my website Shapes in the Fire where the social and political implications of the trans-rational nature of human beings is explored in depth.
written November 4th, 2003
