"It seems peripheral at best to the affairs of today..."
The effects of 9/11 are perhaps today more pertinent than ever. My life and freedom are affected by the surveillance that sprang from the legislation enacted in the shock of grief and anger daily. It was a coup, and transformed what was left of America, land of the free, after the Kennedy assassination and coup, into the surveillance police state it has become, where Goolag and Facehugger are funded by the CIA and deliver our data to covert overlords without possibility of challenge in the atmosphere of fear free people live in today.
Under Shrub, John Yoo (or Yee. Mix them two up), the President's legal counsel said that it was lawful for the President to order the testicles of a child to be crushed to interrogate his parents. Under Obama an American child was assassinated, without being convicted of a crime - without even being accused of wrongdoing at all - and no legal challenge or censure of any kind ensued.
This is the legacy of 9/11 that haunts the home of the brave today.
The government no longer fears it's subjects, it's property and possession, as it did in Athens, Tennessee, or even respect us. It is we that fear orange jump suits and indefinite detention, rendition, or even just termination for no reason at all.
I was a child in Alaska. During hunting season I would bring my hunting rifle to school on the bus, and leave it in my locker until school ended, when I would hike through the woods and hunt on the way home. All the kids in my school were generally armed similarly. We fought, bullied and teased one another, stole each other's girlfriends.
No one ever got shot. No one ever even pulled a gun.
If ever some psycho had come to the school to harm us, we would have shot them dead. Not the teachers. Not the cops, while we hid behind classroom doors. We children were competent and prepared to defend ourselves, and kids today should be too. It's not that we didn't know how to shoot each other. It's that we knew better.
That is what perished on 9/11, and why it matters more today then it ever has. We are capable, competent, and community, yet we have been divided, degraded, and deprecated by 9/11, and become more so daily.
It matters. It matters more every day as things get worse. It is absolutely central to our incipient enslavement right now.
"...the surveillance that sprang up..."
"...the legislation enacted..."
"...the surveillance police state..."
These and some other things you mention are the things that seem relevant today to me. I don't see 9/11 as a cause of them though. What we see comes, by my reckoning, from less glamorous issues that have been festering since at least the rise of industrial capitalism and probably long before then. Freedom of whoever or other has been encroached by whoever else since time immemorial, 'our' governments are just mechanizing and formalizing the process in lockstep with the advancement of technology. There didn't need to be 9/11 for this to happen, it's opportunism at best.
I'm not exactly sure where the anecdote about your childhood fits in to the bigger picture, but I can certainly agree with you about gun safety. I'm not mystified by firearms. They're a tool like any other, beholden to the wisdom of the bearer.
I've no support for any president or nominee I've yet seen, and doubt I will for future ones. In my opinion the taint goes back much farther than 2 decades, or 20. At least since the beginning of western civilization we've been eroding respect for humanity. Our colonial forebears willingly dehumanized and slaughtered indigenous peoples the world over. What else can be expected to come from hundreds of years of development by the profit of such actions? Why expect the systems that established, benefited from, and reinforced this status quo to respect the humanity of people now? I don't think a national identity is going to protect anyone from this sort of abuse.
"...what perished on 9/11..."
I thought what perished on 9/11 were a few thousand human beings, not some intangible, inanimate, unfeeling ideals.