American culture is basically infected with a disease. It's in the fiber of their society. It's crazy watching from the outside, but it appears telling someone to give up their guns is no different than telling somebody to give up their religion. Show them proof that their beliefs aren't consistent with reality and they'll just do mental gymnastics to maintain their belief system. Their is also an inbuilt reinforcement of their beliefs from their peers, so they feel extra justified in believing they're right counter to what common sense and the most basic fact checking would prove.
Building on that, it's also not a big surprise that there seems to be a correlation between religiosity and gun nuttiness. Religious people seem to be very proud of their "faith" in things that aren't true, but they believe anyway. They put faith in their indoctrination and praise each other for faithfulness, just like gun nuts do. They don't care about facts, they care about maintaining their faith, since faith has been praised as a virtue even though it shouldn't be.
I don't think this will ever get solved. It's a sick society and there's no cure because religion has too strong a foothold in the USA. When you raise a person from birth to believe facts, logic and reason take a backseat to faith and tradition, you can convince them of all kinds of stupidity that they'll believe with the same fervour in which they believe their religion to be true.
It would be amazing to see an alternate universe where people were free to grow up to age 21 and graduate university free from religious indoctrination. If more Americans opted to not indoctrinate their kids and instead encouraged reason, research, fact checking, etc., the USA would be 10x better off. It'll never happen, though. Dopes gonna dope.
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