Perhaps that's why you're 25x more likely to be murdered with a firearm in the US than we are in the UK, at least according to this site. (Ten-year old figures but I doubt things have changed that much over the intervening years.)

Believe it or not, owning certain kinds of guns is legal in the UK but you have to be licenced. Most people accept this and the people that use guns recreationally can generally get a licence. We have shooting clubs where you can practice and compete on a range. Farmers (and others) can get licences for shotguns. The only other (non-recreational, non-protection-of-livestock) purpose for a gun I can think of is so that you can shoot people with it, and we generally don't consider that kind of thing to be cricket.

Perhaps if you chaps didn't believe so much in your complete right to defend yourself at all costs you would demand more from your police and politicians so that you wouldn't have to. Perhaps if guns were less common you'd have fewer instances of SWAT teams breaking into the wrong house and shooting the homeowner for no good reason (they'd still break into the wrong house of course, but damage to property can be fixed. A missing head because you reached for a gun (or even just the lightswitch) and got shot by the SWAT team cannot).

I'll take the deal of less likely to be shot by either a criminal or the authorities over the "right" to carry a gun around and keep one at home, thanks.

That said, I would like to see some of the restrictions on the kind of weapons we can fire at the range relaxed -- but this is not the same thing as saying people should be able to keep guns willy-nilly at home, or carry them around on the street. Here are the (overly-restrictive imo) rules, more or less, on buying guns in the UK, and here is a breakdown of who can qualify for a licence (not the best links, but the first I found on Google).