I have guns for the same reason I have fishing rods and a bow. I enjoy it, and there’s some satisfaction in being able to hunt or fish for a meal yourself. I didn’t grow up getting to shoot much aside from a few rare afternoons out with a .22 when dad had time. While I fished a lot, didn’t really get into shooting or hunting until after college. I started small game hunting with friends who would go out. While I had a lot of catching up to do, since I hadn’t grown up hunting like they did, I eventually figured out how to clean game without making too much of a disaster of it. I enjoyed the independence of it, knowing more about the whole process and being able to do more for myself. Taught myself to tie flies, eventually started reloading my own ammo, then got further down the rabbit hole to casting bullets. For my leverguns with oversized bores (30-30 and 45-70), rolling my own ammo has been the best way for me to get decent accuracy. I have firearms because they’re useful tools, and it’s just darned fun to know that I cast the bullet that was loaded over the powder I measured, in the brass casing I trimmed and resized, and it hit the target waaay out there down range right where I wanted it to go.
For me it was after both of my parents had passed away. There’s something about losing the people who could still see and treat you as their child, no matter how old you had become, that changes things. I do still feel like I’m waiting to be a grow up sometimes. My great grandfather lived to 101, and still often felt that way. But once the “adults” who raised you are gone, you find yourself out in the open and may have to admit that you’re the adult now.