Many "rural" people live in small towns/cities where their nearest neighbor is mere yards away, others would only consider "rural" to be where the nearest neighbor couldn't be hit with a high-powered rifle.

If you want to have complete freedom over your land, you generally can't live inside a city, because people inside a city are much more interdependent, and what you do can very easily impact others. In the countryside, you have much more freedom to do what you want with it.

One of the biggest difficulties in modern America is bridging the urban/rural divide:

My father, living in a rural area, purchased a shotgun for home defense -- when 911 was accidentally dialed, the sheriff's response time was roughly 30 minutes. Their primary political concerns revolve around taxes and regulation. Sometimes a bear walks through the neighbor's yard.

At our house in the city, on the other hand, I can throw five burritos and hit five other residences. I can't imagine firing that same shotgun in our house, as our windows and our neighbor's windows are in direct opposition. Police response times are quick, but we have people camping in the bushes across the street, a car break-in thrice a decade, and the occasional heroin addict passed out in the park, needle still in his arm.

These are two entirely different modalities of living, and we are trying to apply federal law to both. The second amendment is essential to our democracy, but it is increasingly difficult to argue with the growing calls to address gun violence as a public health threat. Nobody wants to get shot, everyone wants to live free and out from under the thumb of a tyrannical government. We can find a way.

I'm on the border of where my area turns more rural. There are a couple of properties with horses just outside my single street subdivision where I have ~1 1/2 acres. I can have chickens but I can't eat them. Can't have any other foul or livestock without at least twice as much land and a bunch of other restrictions, and I wouldn't be allowed to eat them, either. There's actually _no_ land zoned for general agricultural purposes in my county. None at all. In theory we have a zoning classification for a small farm / ranch type property that allows a smaller than 3ac lot and fewer restrictions on setbacks but I can't find any actual properties with that zoning in the county GIS.

I am allowed to shoot a gun in my back yard tho. Just not at any of the delicious wild animals that pass thru.

I can see half a mile in any direction, and not see another human habitation. Clearly this is rural. And clearly, things around here work a little differently from a city. For instance, I pay for fire service (volunteer fire association; I donate). I essentially don't have police service except for cleaning up after major catastrophes (half a dozen sheriffs per 100 square miles). I saw an eagle swoop by my kitchen window the other night, with a rabbit in its claws (yeah eagle! I'm a gardener). When the deer get out of hand harvesting my garden before I do, I'm allowed to shoot them. With one of my guns, a bigger one because the little ones are for varmints like rabbit, skunk, rats, the occasional badger.

My interactions with a neighbor are purely voluntary, because other than annual discussions about fences (and the fireman's ball) we have little we need to talk about. There are no association rules; there are no inspections nor even inspectors. If my neighbor parks a bunch of trailers behind his windbreak in an ugly rusting mess, go neighbor. I guess I'll just plant a row of trees and wait 10 years to mask the view in that direction.

So just call me Mr. Populist Myth I guess.

On the other hand, no matter where you live, there's always a few "karens" in the neighborhood who will do what they can to keep you from say, renting your property out and having large numbers of otherwise homeless people setting up a tent-city. (that seems to be one of the hard limits).

I technically live in a city of 14k people, but it’s the largest municipality in the county. I’m about two hours from anything that can reasonably be considered a “city”, in a quiet neighborhood where there is practically zero traffic after 8pm or so. This was the most isolated property I could find that’s still got good Internet access.

Price-wise, there’s no comparison. I paid about $120k for a five bedroom house on half an acre. We were looking at townhouses in the last place we lived (Charlottesville, VA) with a tiny yard and half the living space that were going for $325k+.

Generally though I think your point stands, the USA is big enough and varied enough one can usually chose a nearby location which permits hobby farming.

There are rural cities. I'm in a rural area, classified as such by the USDA. There is ample space of farming, hunting and undeveloped wilderness. There's a fully navigable river, lakes, many fishable streams. There aren't neighborhoods, there are some stretches of houses not a great distance apart on a single road.

Then there is the city. It's not a huge city, but it's an urban environment. Again, classified by the government as such. The city is loud, active, and dense. There's no suburban area though. That's the difference. There's just rural farmland and wooded areas, no meandering neighborhoods with a random shopping center over and over. You go from rural to urban immediately. The first thing I come to is from a massive orchard to a dense violent apartment complex and a strip of 24hr stores.