Thanks for clarifying, I appreciate it. I'm always a little wary of big edits on sites that don't show an edit history. (HN devs, why not??)
I agree that context matters. You're describing a different time and place, pretty far removed from the vast majority of Americans now: rural life, probably a couple decades ago.
In 2010, over 80% of us lived in cities. Six years ago, less than one in five of us lived in rural America--now I'm quite sure it's even fewer. The context of "let's walk around with guns" is basically missing from the vast, vast majority of our lives.
Like you said, living in a city, you'd be sketched out if you saw someone with a gun. And, indeed, we see this play out again and again. People going into restaurants with AR-15s, people wandering around neighborhoods with those big guns on their shoulders. Pretty consistently, someone calls the cops, because, in context of "I live in a city" that applies to 80% of us, this is sketchy behavior.
This is what gets me about the people that want to import gun attitudes from another time and place--from what is basically a distant and foreign culture for most of us--into modern city life.
As a thought experiment, let's not say "the rural American landowners who wrote the constitution 250 years ago felt a certain way about guns, so let's keep on going with that". Let's start from "most of us live in cities, what do we want city life to be like?" And it sounds like neither you nor I particularly want to see random people walking around with guns.
Heh, as a good for-example, yesterday I was downtown, at lunchtime, in a crowded part of the downtown area. Lots of food cards, hundreds of people gathered around. Out of nowhere, a mentally disturbed guy started harassing some lady's daughters. A bunch of us immediately started yelling at him to back off, and started putting ourselves physically between him. The dude was obviously mentally ill, but also possibly a threat to someone, just from flailing his limbs around like a crazy dude.
Well, we kept him separated from the lady and her daughters--just with our voices and our bodies--and he continued to have a freakout, yell, and after 2-3 minutes the cops on bikes showed up to keep him contained until, I'm guessing, some cop in a car could haul him to some kind of lockup. I'm sure, if he'd gotten more aggressive, me and a few other people (heh, even some in business suits) would have tackled him and sat on him.
What's scary to me is...what if someone had a gun and thought they'd be a hero? Best case is, they suppress that thought, pretend they don't have a gun, and we get the outcome like we had, with minimal damage to all. Worst case is, they start firing, and either shoot the crazy dude, or even worse, they shoot some bystanders. Odds are, here in the city (where 80% of us work and live), guns won't make ordinary people into heroes, they'll just make tense situations deadly.