The slaves were another problem said government imposed on America, people knew the world was round in ancient Greece but people in the 1970s were terrified of imminent nuclear winter, so "progress" is not so much of a thing, as wishful thinking. More to the point, we have had a highly functional system of stable government that protects individual liberties (including violently putting an end to the domestic institution of slavery, for which those guns came in handy) and human rights, and even made up rights of gay people not to have their feelings hurt, and the guys who invented that system thought that "lots of people owning guns" was an integral part of that. They expressly stated in the Constitution that a well-armed population is required to restrain the government and maintain a free state.

I would like to point out that the most significant current events issue taking place in the USA involves a government agent killing an unarmed man, and one of the latest in a long string of such incidents over the last 20 years or so. I'm betting that if the amusingly named Michael Brown had an Uzi, there would not have been nearly so much hullabaloo in Ferguson.