Guns are an indelible part of the entirety of American culture and ownership is constitutionally backed by the Second Amendment. But gun violence increasingly plagues American life. There seems no good measure of the political gap separating advocates for gun rights and those for gun violence prevention. 

The historic tradition of individualism in the U.S. may give some understanding to how the nation reached this point, suggests Grant Reeher, director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute.

“We are fundamentally more individually oriented than people in other nations,” Reeher says. “In our thinking, we start with individuals; we don’t start with communities and we don’t start with collectives. And it’s reflected in a lot of things. We have a Bill of Rights that is baked into our Constitution,” he says.

“Those are individual rights—the rights of individuals against the government,” says Reeher.