I was buying tickets at a water park earlier this summer when I noticed the sticker on the ticket window: a gun in the middle of a circle with a red line through it. It looked like a “no parking” sign. Those stickers are everywhere in the state of Illinois, in the so-called heartland of the United States, where fields planted with corn and soybeans stretch for miles and fluffy green trees make summer canopies across small town streets.

In Illinois, it is illegal to carry a gun openly, although it is possible to apply for a concealed carry licence. But if you have the requisite licence in 13 states, you can carry a gun openly – and in more than 30 states, open carry is legal even without a special licence.

Another distinctive element of American identity worn proudly, especially by those on the political right, is “rugged individualism” as opposed to the spirit of collectivism that prevails in Europe.

The “rugged individual” conjures up, in the minds of many, the image of the early settlers of new frontiers. They needed guns to kill animals to eat; they needed guns to protect themselves and their families; and guns were needed as valuable tools for a lot of other vital purposes. The popularity of hunting in rural states is testimony to this enduring ideal. The notion of the individual over the collective has an added dimension. And herein lies a perhaps unique feature of American patriotism: love country, loathe government.

The individual has a duty to himself and to those who depend upon him. No individual has a right to rely on government or on the rest of society for assistance. In fact, government, to the degree that it meddles in or interferes with the individual’s quest for freedom – or, stated more accurately, his self-interest – is the enemy. To take it a step further, the government can be un-American. As such, gun ownership, while for some an open act of defiance against the potential threat posed by their own government, is at the very least a conscious or subconscious assertion of individual freedom over the government, and the collective it embodies.

Scaling down from these loftier heights to the realities of 2018, it is important to note that many of us don’t own guns and have no interest in them. Nonetheless, it is imperative that the rest of the world recognises that our country is very different – even if most Americans don’t. There is a gun culture that will never be vanquished.

According to pro-gun activists, business owners who try to keep their premises gun-free with signs and stickers like the one I saw at the water park are creating “disarmed victim zones”, a rhetorical sleight of hand that illustrates the depth of the country’s obsession to firearms. The gun madness that saturates the US means that when we go to the movies in America, my older son does a careful survey of where the cinema exits are, “just in case”.

That my children feel safer in Abu Dhabi than they do in the US seems terribly ironic because when we first moved to Abu Dhabi nearly eight years ago, people asked me if I were going to be safe “over there”. The writer is an associate professor of literature at NYU, Abu Dhabi