I suspect many were around simply because the families that had them had always had them. No place I have lived has ever been safer than that town of about 3,000. It was one of those communities where people didn't lock their doors at night. Two decades have gone by, but it's not much different there today. Crime rates in North Dakota, where I still have family, remain very low by national standards.
Guns are still commonplace.
The situation is the same throughout much of the rural Midwest and West. These facts are often offered by those who oppose any gun controls, and perhaps that explains why they make so many gun-control advocates squirm. Perhaps it explains why those advocates so quickly retreat into simple-minded generalizations. It's a feeling that any attachment to guns is an attachment to the irrational, violent, selfish side of human nature. Given the damage guns have done, this is understandable.