The Swiss attitude toward guns is an international anomaly. It's also something American advocates of gun freedom cite as an example of what the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is supposed to stand for. But Americans tend to behave differently, and there are no easy answers why. Many experts agree America's record rates of violence result from a complex and intertwined set of causes such as family issues, neighborhood concerns, drug abuse, the glorification of Handguns make up 80 percent of all guns used in U.S. crimes. But two-thirds of all guns in America are rifles and shotguns, handguns the other third.
Violence is learned and easily picked up.
But when confronted with the extraordinary rates of U.S. gun violence, it seems America's frontier past is still very much a part of its present. In the land of Crocodile Dundee, one cannot buy a gun for self-defense. But in the United States, roughly half the 65 million handguns in private hands are owned by Americans who want to protect themselves from the millions of other pistol-packing Americans. In the United States, they are somehow comfortable with the idea that they may shoot someone. Some 270 million Americans collectively own an estimated 200 to 250 million firearms.