I assume you're in America. I'm answering it from a United States perspective, because that's where I am.

Firearms have been a part of this nation's culture since the beginning. Civilian ownership of firearms allowed the colonists to survive in a hostile environment, to defend their families, and to rise up and found the first modern Democracy.

The founding fathers recognized the importance of firearms in maintaining the people's safety and liberty, that's why the wrote the Second Amendment to the Constitution, to legally protect the people's (ie, individual civilian people) right to own and carry weapons.

The Declaration of Independence speaks to three main rights, "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." The pursuit of happiness typically involves both property rights and freedom of conscience, essentially, the right to pursue your dreams and goals without the King or governor micromanaging your life.

The right to life sounds self-explanatory, but along with that right is included the right to *exercise and defend* that right. In other words, if I have the right to life, then I have the right to self-defense, to defend that right. And just like the freedom of the press would be meaningless if the newspapers weren't allowed to own printing presses and TV stations weren't allowed to broadcast, the right to self-defense would be worthless if the people weren't allowed to carry useful tools for self-defense. And so far, despite the martial arts schools, pepper spray, and Taser promoters' claims, nothing is nearly as effective as a gun for self-defense.

Google "founding fathers gun quotes" if you want to hear it in their words. One site that has several quotes is http://www.saf.org/pub/rkba/general/FoundersQuotes.htm another is http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndfqu.html

Thus, from the beginning, Americans were armed. And throughout history, we have continued to be. In World War II, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto was quoted as saying "We can never invade the mainland United States. We would find a rifle behind every blade of grass."

Today, with hunting and shooting sports dwindling (from something "everybody does" to something "only country people do"), the nature of support for the right to keep and bear arms is changing. More people own guns for protection, more people are interested in "evil black rifles" or "semiautomatic assault weapons" (weapons like the AR-15 and WASR-10, which are non-military, non-automatic cousins of the M-16 and AK47, weapons that gather a lot of political attention, but are actually used in less than 3% of gun crimes), and more people are interested in "cowboy action shooting," which allows only firearm designs that existed in the 1800's and were used on the American Frontier.

On the downside, this means that fewer people grow up shooting, so the average skill level of the American shooter is dropping. On the upside, it means more people are paying attention to their right to be armed, and thinking about what it means to them, and what responsible gun ownership means to them.

Virtually every country's criminals have weapons, even those with the strictest gun control laws (Russia, for example, doesn't allow civilian gun ownership, but its criminals are much better armed than ours. The same goes for Mexico).

But firearms are so widespread here because our right to have them is protected, and exercised. People want them, and we haven't let anyone ban them yet.

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