"Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Adrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill."

That's from Paradise, by John Prine. I grew up in Minnesota, in that kind of rural "gun culture", save that none of the kids I hung out with had a pistol. The guns weren't that much of our lives, and had nothing to do with a disregard for human life. I still have my .22 rifle, which I haven't fired in 30 years.
In our area of Michigan, we are commonly over-run with more deer than the area can sustain, unless all the farmers simply plant their crops and leave them there for the herds to prosper on. I don't hunt for at least two reasons; I have no taste for the kill, and if I tried to respond to the sudden appearance of game, my responses would be a clumsy jumble and I would be a hazard.
I've also worked for awhile with a (white)city kid who came to work with a pile of photos of his friends and himself playing with the arsenal that made them big men in their own minds. You don't even have to have mental illness to create a nightmare when you have that culture and an abundance of guns, and it makes precious little difference who originally purchased a given gun legally.