So much to respond to....

"Bill if you live there do you want to use one of my handguns. I got lots"

Dan..no thanks *grin*... had one once, in Kansas. a .22 5 shot pistol. The rules fro ownership were pretty lax. (I was about 26) I fired it ONCE way out in the desert ..just to see if it worked. I loaned it to a lady who thought she had prowlers. Someone broke in and stole the gun. It was pawned. The pawn shop notified the police, who wrote me and said that if I wanted, I could redeem it by paying the pawn shop $35 that he had taken it in for. HA! I never ever came near having one again, and have never needed one.
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Lighter.." And I stand by my use of "induction." The premises reasonably suggest a conclusion but do not prove it. (did you ever teach 'abduction'? I still can't quite cope with that one.)
well then my explanation was unnecessary, though your answer is part of my point,,,'won't' is one possible inductive conclusion, but in such cases, the one a person chooses may be highly subjective. I happen to think that "won't" implies much too strongly that a fairly common attitude can be extrapolated to apply to a class (the 'country' as a collective noun).
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This "From: Backwoodsman - PM
Date: 30 Aug 14 - 02:53 AM"

is harder to reply to, though I have answered almost everything in it several times.

"if you have a political system that,....has been constructed in a way that prevents modernisation and carefully-debated adjustment to that system, then it is seriously flawed."

Yes.. what's to dispute about that? But it BECAME flawed because of the changing times & technology. No one in 1789 could have foreseen AK-47s. We had a frontier society with wilderness and danger as it expanded to the West. (No matter what one says about the crimes inflicted on the Native Americans). By the time mass-produced, standardized weapons were common, after the Civil War, the idea of owning a firearm was taken for granted, and much of the West was still 'wild' until about the end of that century. The really serious problem of easy access to guns was not big news until the 1920s and prohibition and Al Capone and such having sub-machine guns. By then the basic idea of there being guns everywhere was pretty much set. Not everyone had one, but every farmer & cowboy and trapper did.

"Yet the sane 75% allow the minority-gun-nutters to control the situation!"

There's another word... "allow". The LAW allows.... I have explained how difficult is is to change any law that many 'like' and most think IS okayed by the Constitution. No one NEEDED to misinterpret the 2nd amendment until recently...it just 'was'. By the time it became obvious to many that it was "seriously flawed" due to its references having morphed, "militia" and "keep & bear arms", too many guns and too many owners were entrenched! And some of them WOULD shoot you if you tried to disarm them!

"That is what we find so hard to understand - why do the huge majority allow their lives to be threatened by a comparatively small minority? I can only guess it's because of apathy on the part of non-gun-owners, and an acceptance that guns are somehow 'normal' in your society. "

"Apathy" fits a few... but 'awareness' is the word that seems to fit most... awareness of what the status is! If the law says folks can have guns, and "states rights" allows local jurisdictions, with all their prejudices, to control those laws, and the NRA's propaganda clouds the issue, any degree of frustrated inaction may look like apathy from the outside.
   There ARE groups working VERY hard to change things, and some of the recent sad tragedies have given the movement some traction. They have fairly wide support in polls, but revising the 2nd amendment require either a very tedious (almost impossible) political process...OR... a Supreme Court which will strike down and revise the interpretation of that awkward phrase. Right now there are just too many idiots..ummmm conservatives on the court, several of those are still young enough to be around awhile.
(Obviously, we need a series of Democratic presidents to outlast the idiots and appoint sane judges. We shall see... I have hopes.)

I keep trying to answer your "whys", but no answer, no matter how clear & accurate, can be satisfying. The word is full of frustrating 'whys' these days.... the Middle East, Ukraine, N. Korea..etc... a few years ago it was 'why' in Northern Ireland, and they mostly used bombs, I think. It appears the sides just got weary of the carnage... I don't remember them having to revise the laws to quit killing.

I hope that a multi-pronged attack on the situation will help... gun show laws being revised, more help for the mentally disturbed, more cameras in certain areas, better checks on gun purchases, more education, fewer TV shows & movies glorifying weapons...etc.

But 'why' is still only answerable by pointing... "there! See?"