WASHINGTON (AFP) — Guns were an essential tool in frontier life when the United States was formed hundreds of years ago, and even today the right to carry them remains a fundamental part of the country's identity.
Hence the heated emotions surrounding an issue that comes before the Supreme Court this week -- how modern society should interpret gun rights that were written into the Second Amendment of the Constitution during a very different era.
The deadly impact of gun-toting criminals in recent years has made its way into the nation's conscience with a spate of gruesome mass shootings, particularly at schools and universities.
But the massacres, such as the nation's worst school rampage to date when a 23-year-old South Korean gunman at Virginia Tech University killed 32 people including himself last year, have largely failed to rouse any widespread movement against the right to bear arms.
Instead, the local press in Blacksburg, where the shootings occurred, focused on the opposite notion after the fact -- whether the killings could have been prevented or reduced if students or professors were allowed to carry guns in class.
America's love for guns "comes from the history and the geography of the nation, the fact that it was a very decentralized, sparsely populated frontier-dominated culture without a sense of a sovereign government," said William Vizzard, a professor of criminal justice at California State University.
The reason that even some liberal Americans will not take up the cause for abolition of guns is a relic of that older time, a "political cultural trend from the frontier society that was very self-reliant," Vizzard said.
When the first colonists arrived on what are now US shores, it was an every man -- or at least every group -- for himself mentality that ensured the strong survived and which fueled settlers' fights with Native Americans already on the land, the French arriving from Canada, and the Spanish moving up from Florida.
And once the United States gained its independence from Britain the founding fathers determined that an armed population was the best way to resist takeover by dictatorship or aristocracy, according to Eugene Volokh, law professor at University of California Los Angeles.
The United States' third president Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and one of the main authors of the US Constitution of 1787, believed firmly in this principle.
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms in his own land," Jefferson wrote. "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
And the Second Amendment to the Constitution, added in 1791, assures that: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
According to Justice Joseph Story, the "right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers," he wrote in an academic paper.
However, he noted that "among the American people there is a growing indifference to any sense of militia discipline," and questioned "how it is practicable to keep the people duly armed without some organization."
Today, a large part of what pushes millions of Americans to join the powerful gun lobby the National Rifle Association (NRA) is a "you're not-gonna-tell-me-what-to-do reaction to government," accord to Vizzard, a former agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
In addition, sheer consumerism plays its role.
"Each culture develops its interest in something, and in the United States' consumerism, guns are just a part of that."
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