I live in the Netherlands a country with a huge drug cartel problem and still civilians don't carry guns.

Criminals shoot eachother and occasionally they shoot law enforcement if they are really dumb. Normal people when there is a shoot out just hide until the incident is over. You'd have to be stupid to get involved. More guns do not equal more safety- especially not because your average wannabe Rambo can't shoot for shit.

And how is that different than the US? Do you think people when they hear gun shots all grab their guns and run outside in the US? The US has a crime problem, but that crime problem is neither caused by guns nor will be solved by gun prohibitions.

Even despite the prevalence of legal firearms the US busts illegal gun factories every week, there is no feasible way to disarm the US population except through them wanting to be disarmed and willingly destroying their guns. And until US police stop shooting people with impunity, courts stop imprisoning people for being poor, the government stops deploying armed US troops on US soil and running a gestapo squad, and until crime rates drop to something not resembling countries without functioning governments, I don't see why the US population should want to disarm themselves.

Some people choose to cower when there is danger, others choose to act in defense.

You may choose to call one group of people "normal", just as I could about the other, but it is plain to see how silly that is.