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You're right. It's not the guns.
In my little conservative Midwest farming town, which is pretty much the 21sy century equivalent of Mayberry, the high school boys (and hopefully the girls as well) join rifle and trap club. The web site for our local gun range proudly displays photos of the different shooting groups for our local youth and women.
And yes, during hunting season, the kids carry their shotguns and rifles in gun racks in their trucks and nobody ever goes crazy when they see a gun in a student's truck parked in the school parking lot.
My town is clean, quiet and perfectly safe. The presence of the sheriff's deputies is very reliable. I see a sheriff's car driving an hourly patrol any time I happen to be looking out the window at a quarter past the hour. It's not unusual to see a post from the sheriff's office on our town's Facebook group when someone in town sees a stranger who looks like they don't belong here.
My town has changed little since I grew up in this part of the country, many decades ago. The people who live in the city are the ones who have changed, but it's gratifying to realize that the pace of that change in the population center nearest to me is not nearly as precipitous as the pace of the changes in the large dem run cities. If we decided to secede from the nation now, the changes that need to be made would hardly be noticed. A few people would find life in my state intolerable and they'd move.
It's not the guns.