Olddude bleats "What is going on in the mind of America today....?" Well like many a spoilt brat, America got rich to excess, couldn't handle it and wound up degenerate to the point of choosing Trump.

A bigger question is, what's going on in olddude's mind? To which the answer is what Steve said: gun culture. It's a culture that like many another (and all religions*) infects minds from the cradle. If I had been born into it myself, I would probably have succumbed. It takes a strong mind to resist. Gun culture was cultivated in the darkest days of America's dark modern history - part of what Dee Brown in Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee called "an almost reverential attitude to the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it."

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*I'm always amused by those who offer their prayers as a first response. What do they say in those prayers, and what kind of god do they think is listening?