<i>America's unique gun culture</i>

For many Americans, the right to bear arms is not only enshrined in the constitution, it is a key civil liberty.
The right was born out of the War of Independence when armed militias had the right to protect. Centuries have passed but the rules haven't.
The deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary is provoking another heated round of the same conversation that the US has after every mass shooting: is there something particular or unusual to its gun culture? Yet, answers are hard to find.
Americans don't just have more guns that anyone else -- 310 million nonmilitary firearms as of 2009 -- they also have the highest gun ownership per capita rate in the world, with an average of about nine guns for every 10 Americans. The second highest gun ownership rate in the world is Yemen.
The second-ranking country, India, a country over three times of US population, has 46 million. And the vast majority of the world's countries have fewer 10 million guns held by its citizens.
Each year, more than 31,000 Americans die from gunshots, most of them self-inflicted, but more than 11,000 in homicides -- five times as many as the death toll for US troops during an entire decade of conflict in Afghanistan.
America's gun-related murder rate is the highest in the world, excluding Mexico, where the ongoing drug war pushes the murder stats way up.