The gun lobby, oh my peaceful friends, you may hate, but first you had better understand that it is a religion, only secondarily connected to the bill of Rights. The thick-headed, sometimes even close to tearful, gaze you get when chatting with one of its partisans emanates from the view that they're holding a piece of God. There is no persuading them otherwise, even by a genius, because a life without guns implies the end of the known world to them. Any connection they make to our 'pioneer' past is also a fraud, a wistful apology. Folks love a gun for what it can do. A murderer always thinks it was an accident, he says as if a religious episode had passed over him.
Source: Bats out of Hell, Barry Hannah, [Houghton Mifflin, 1993] p.83