Well, personally I think these are a couple of reasons…
A man ain’t a man without a sixshooter.
Having spent their formative years running around the playground “shooting” one another what could one expect from adult Americans?
The bad news is movies and TV have upped the ante since.
Errrr…
suspect most British primary schoolboys of that time had cap guns and played ‘Cowboys and Indians’ - suppose today (if still allowed) that would be ‘Cowpersons and the Subjugation of First Nation Peoples’…
True, I was a deadshot myself 
never without a roll of caps to hand (I can still remember the smell of them). But we weren’t able to swap caps for 40 calibre bullets in the “toyshop” when we were 14.
I had a cap gun too but preferred to stand on the caps and fire them off! My family in Texas say its an inborn thing, all their friends have guns and even leave some intheir pickups all the time and regard it as their godgiven right to use them although they are mostly sensible people and only go into the scrub to do so. You can buy them in Walmart and need no licence unlike the UK where our shotgun had to be chained up and yearly visits made by the police.
Britain had a National Rifle Association before the Yanks did and very relaxed gun laws before the establishment got worried about armed British WW1 veterans catching the Leninitus that was sweeping across Europe.
Why do Americans like guns?
Little Britain had a view as to why Cops love (or need) their guns – a bit rude.
I watched both series on UK TV, and I’d hazard a guess that they were both very popular programmes, with high ratings in the UK, but we, those UK audiences, didn’t succumb to the love of guns, except as kids with cap guns perhaps, in the way Americans have as adults with real guns. What’s the missing ingredient? Politics?
The Pew centre says that 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they personally own a gun, compared with 20% of Democrats & Democratic-leaning owners.
I think it goes further back into history than Bonanza and Gunsmoke - I’m no historian - but I think ‘gun-love’ came before the TV series - but maybe exacerbated by them in later years.
I’d add that you may be right that ‘a man ain’t a man without a sixshooter’ which leads to the Little Britain viewpoint IMO.
The missing ingredient is that the U.K. has made it increasingly difficult for its citizens to own anything other than a shotgun since 1968.
The irony is that Britain’s only two mass shootings were down to the police allowing known fruitloops to continue to posses firearms.
And after both events, they simply banned the things used without any change to their procedures to monitor FAC holders. The only police force that came to have a chat and check storage was compliant with their guidelines on Certificate renewal was the Met. Hertfordshire couldn’t be bothered on my initial grant or on any of the renewals to do so.
We were at Bordeaux airport coming back from a holiday in France and we got talking to a chap on the British Olympic shooting team, who had to go abroad to practice.
Mad.
Because they are totally mad.
I can understand having a shotgun if you live deep in the country, but anything else, unless you are a criminal, is totally unnecessary.
Correct. When I worked at Notting Hill I had to visit shotgun owners to check their security.
As a child I watched cowboy films endlessly and had my own gun. I desperately wanted a Buntline Special but had to make do with an ordinary revolver. However, I never had a desire to own a real gun.
In the Met I was once shown round the Firearms Unit and allowed to fire a couple of guns. The power in them was terrifying, Thank goodness we don’t have lax gun laws.
The French appear to be a bit more relaxed about guns, especially shotguns because, like the NRA, the Chasse is a powerful body.
The things slung across the backs of our wild boar hunters are rifles.
I was under the impression that you could use a shotgun loaded with slugs for boar hunting in dense brush.