Of course an 18 year old can't buy a beer. Guns and alcohol don't mix. Even Americans know that.
Seriously, good points from WK about the US as a young country (although not a young state), the frontier mentality of just going for what they want, rough justice and taking care of things themselves. We all know the downside of this in terms of the war on the native Americans, lynching black people, and robber baron capitalists acting like god-kings. But anyone who knows everyday Americans knows the upside -very little of the deference and caution that used to characterize us. I've told the story before on here of American students of mine hired for a catering event in the UK which was poorly managed by a local. While their local counterparts hung around and took the piss, the Americans decided to own the whole thing, sort it out and got it running right. No pay off. It just annoyed them to see something so fixable not working properly. For them, the world was not a screw. It was a place that's supposed to work.
They're born moralizing about the world. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? And they tend to assume that they're the good guys, if clumsy at times. I find this very hard still after over thirty years, but even though pushing everything into a moral frame leaves them open to charges of spectacular hypocrisy, it does force people into justifying why things are the way they are, rather than relying on saying it's all rotten, must always be so, and thinking we're smart for realizing it.
A big argument over here right now is about how all the things which made American rich, powerful and successful -its limited government, market economy, engaged citizenry, and its sense of exceptionalism- seem to have turned into sources of weakness -political gridlock, economic inequality, social distemper, and plain stupidity (sounds familiar, right?). People ask is it because the world has changed in such a way that America now has the wrong skills set, or is it simply a slow but steady shift in the balance of power, or is it a bit of both.
Thinking big, you can see all this in terms of Anglo-Saxon liberalism as about played out in world where big power concentrations, big thinking and the extensive social control to deliver it (think China, maybe think EU) possess the winning formula in a future of heavy regulation, intrusive surveillance and everyone looked after. Brexit and Trumpism in this view are the symptoms of stress and nervous breakdowns as the Anglos get left behind. Conversely (of course), you can see them as setting the pace in terms of responding to a world which is changing. Neither Donald nor Boris (I've given up on him after yesterday) convey the impression that they know what they're doing in these terms, but that's the point -no one is sure of the world into which we're moving, but if this is right, then we can be sure that customs unions, highly regulated shared markets and railways (even maglevs) from Beijing to Brussels belong to the world we're leaving behind, not the one we're heading towards.
I know people with guns. They make the classic defence argument. We don't want the them, but the other fellow has them/might have them. The police are busy and slow. Just as in international relations, it is a tragically self-fulfilling way of thinking -which is not to say it is necessarily crazy, although the police I know all maintain that guns are far more likely to get people into trouble than save them.