You make some good points, but people in NYC are not good representations of the bulk of America. They liked to be coddled by government. Living on top of one another like so many sardines in a can shape's one's view of things.
America's love with guns frankly goes hand in hand with the sense of personal freedom. I realize most Western nations have similar laws to the US on most matters, but the US's freedom of speech goes further than most Western countries, as does its protections for self-defense. Simply, the rights of the individual are held to a higher regard.
The New York example was made precisely to support my idea that it is mainly esthetics that drive attitude towards personal firearms. New York City's are much closer to those of urban Europe, and we also see similar attitude towards owning guns. It is when you move towards the more rural ares and what used to be not so long ago the frontier, that you encounter what is the more stereotypical "American gun lover".
Personally, I have issues with the argument about personal freedom. I see it often mentioned (again, somewhat stereotypically) by Americans, but as somebody who has lived in a dozen countries and still divides equally his time between the US and Europe I have a hard time understanding what it really means aside from the rhetoric.
In fact, if you ask most people abroad they would tell you that having dudes walking around with guns impact negatively their freedom. Most specifically their freedom to walk around without being surrounded by dudes who have the means of shooting you whenever they have a particularly bad day.
In terms of freedom of speech I am also a little dubious. I can come up with only one significant example, that is the prohibition of apology of nazism/fascism, which I personally very much support. It only impacts nazis/fascists, which I am all for impacting.
Other than that I cannot think of anything published in the last 50 years in the US that was not published in Europe because of censorship. I can however tell you that in term of nudity and references to sex, the United States see orders of magnitude more censorship than western Europe. The very first thing my girlfriend, who is American, noticed about Paris was the amount of nudity in more or less any advertisement billboard. Not saying it's a good thing, but certainly some people in Europe feel the American censorship in that respect limiting freedom of expression more than rules limiting apology of nazism.
Honestly, these days I feel very little factual differences between the urban United States and Western Europe. The biggest ones are based on esthetics more than ethics, and are mostly about the romanticized idea of the american frontier (big cars, cowboy boots, the military life, guns, sparse settlements) that are instead associated in Europe with a
weltanschauung very much frowned upon. There is never a good way I can explain to my European friends why on earth so many people here drive a truck. It is a constant source of puzzlement, and again it is based on the way people culturally receive these objects.
Facebook
Twitter