I don't understand the pride bit.
It seems like a regrettable situation where your distrust of your fellow citizens is so strong that you are comforted by the ability to kill them with minimal effort.
(I'm in Australia, where we have some truly horrendous legislation, but I totally agree with our gun ownership laws here, and echo other people's observations that gun ownership does not seem to equate to, or ineluctably lead to, better laws / more freedoms outside the right 'to own lethal weapons' itself.)
Perhaps I could interest you in some Iain M Banks (taken from Excession) :
"It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation of weapons was a kind of tragedy."