When I was seven, me and the other kids in the neighborhood would ride around on our bikes with our BB guns across our handle bars. It was a rare occasion for any of us to go out and play without our BB guns. When I was around eleven I got a BB pistol, then I would ride my bike around with the pistol in my pocket and the BB gun across my handel bars. When I was 14 I got a paintball gun and my friends and I would shoot each other. In America guns are not even so much weapons, they are tools. For Thanksgiving I went to visit an old friend of mine. He now owns 20 some acres in Tennesse. It was pretty cool seeing the place were he lives. His neighbors are nuts, they rarely go out onto their front porch to enjoy a relaxing evening without their shotguns. My friend is nothing like his neighbors, but he owns his fair share of guns also. He has on occasion had trouble with dogs attacking his chickens, in cases like that if you wish to keep you chickens, having a gun is a good thing. It is a very different culture. But I think it is silly to treat guns as evil inventions that were only made to kill people. Like I said before, if we didn't have guns then we would still have knifes. There would still be armed robbery, and there would still be murder, there would still be war. Guns have very little to do with any of these things, other than the fact they are the most advanced and well suited for these in most cases. If the gun had never been invented, something else would have. There are even plenty of gun phobic Americans. In the part of the states I live now, if I told people that I had a BB gun (wasn't a toy, plenty strong to kill small birds and squrrels) when I was just seven, they would go into shock. Where I grew up (in the Northwest US) it was quite typical.