My wife has a t-shirt that reads:
If guns kill people then spoons make Michael Moore fat.
When I was in high school many of us had a shotgun or rifle in our trucks/cars. Not only was it permitted, but some times you could find a teacher out there with a student admiring a gun they got for Christmas or a birthday. It had been that way for.... about a century (not the cars, of course).
It was right around the Columbine shootings that they changed everything. There is so much that happened in the 90’s that the Left used to trample on Liberty that it is hard to calculate.