Manifestly dangerous destiny

So I've been thinking about this some more. What is it about guns that is buried so deep within the American psyche that despite our being the only high-profile democracy with a massive shooting-death problem, we will never, ever ban or even meaningfully restrict them?

I would have said 'highly-evolved' or 'highly-developed' democracy rather than 'high-profile,' but sadly that would not have been true. In 1789, when our Constitution was finalized, we might have been called one of the highly-evolved democracies, in that there weren't too many of us and at least we'd put together some paperwork. And in the 1950s, before special-interest lobbying and donor corruption had become so prevalent and destructive to congress, our democracy might have been called highly-developed. But now we are just famous. Appropriate, but not edifying.

What's the obsession with guns and the resulting violence problem all about? Do Americans glorify gun violence more than other nations? Or do we just have more guns to act it out in real life? Do we have more undiagnosed or unmedicated mental illness, or do we just have more freedom to opt out of treatment and opt in to other pastimes that keep us quiet, like violent video games and television?

Looking at the origin story,  since there were people here already when the Europeans 'discovered' America, the settlers/invaders needed to use force to conquer. Back in Europe the average citizen/resident did not need to invade or conquer in order to establish residence, and so did not require weaponry. Therefore the ownership and use of guns on this continent by European settlers was directly related to their role as individual citizen-conquerors, and represented a marked difference from how they had lived in the old world. Without those weapons, people on the frontiers would not have been able to defend their homes against those whose lands they were appropriating, since it would have taken days or weeks for the closest sanctioned cavalry to arrive. The earliest, most enterprising Americans, the pioneers who 'made this country great,' depended on weapons for their continued existence.
So, weapons played an enormous role in making the country great, and helped forge a different path to greatness from those that had existed back in Europe.

On the frontier, there was no democracy - there was only individual enterprise and defense.  I've noticed that the people who fight loudest and longest for guns seem to be the ones who think that guns are the only thing that will allow them to stand up to and fight back against  'the government.' If this is true, it's a huge chink in the armor of our vaunted democracy. The point of democracy is (kind of) that everyone gets a say, not everyone gets the right to shoot people if they feel their rights are being impinged upon. But if you identify as a patriot with the pioneers who made America 'great,' then you haven't really made peace with the idea of democracy, since there was no democracy on the frontier. 

So maybe that's it. America is built on the use of guns to overtake a continent of people who had lived here for centuries, and the only rule of law was who was armed and who was the quicker draw. Freedoms of speech and religion didn't really matter when there was no one in charge. And deep down, maybe Americans believe that since guns are what helped make this country what it is, restricting the right of anyone to own and use them is to take away an important piece of what it means to be American; what it means to be different from the cultures and societies we left behind (no matter who much they have each evolved since that time); what it means, on the frontier, to be secure and free.