I grew up in the 70's to. We rode bikes all over but didn't have guns
. I can't even imagine a parent thinking that would be a good idea. The hitchhiking thing is also crazy. I hope your dad counts his lucky stars that nothing happened to you.
The gun is what was a Southern thing; I'm assuming that the OP is male. In many parts of the South, including where I grew up, a .22 rifle is a rite-of-passage gift for a boy's 12th birthday. I didn't know any girl who got her own; we had to beg to be allowed to use our brothers' or Dads' guns if we wanted to hunt. (And men/boys didn't want us with them because having a girl around meant that they couldn't relieve themselves in the woods or swear as much as they wanted to.)
Starting in the mid-1960's it was no longer considered safe for women to hitch, but guys frequently did it until well into the 1970's. It was still considered safe to for them if they only got into the back of a pickup and not the cab, or rode with a trucker who wanted someone to talk to.
To me, the greatest change is in how we define safety. In that era, when our parents assumed we were "safe" -- what they meant was "safe from malice". "Safe from accidental injury" wasn't so much of a concern; the idea was that we would learn from experience not to take risks that we could not handle. People accepted that kids would get hurt sometimes, and that once in a blue moon they might even suffer a serious or even fatal injury, but that was considered a reasonable risk. Previous generations tended to give kids a lot more credit for instinct than parents seem to do today. My DS has been spending afternoons alone after school for 4 years now, and yes, occasionally he has hurt himself; but he knows to who to call and what to do if there is an accident, so I don't obsess about his safety.
Some of us came from cultures outside of the US, where events akin to 9/11 were always a horror, but not so unthinkable. What we accepted a long time ago is that you really can never effectively protect yourself against that kind of random spectacular violence if you are unlucky enough to be a victim of it, so there is no sense in worrying about it or trying to protect your family from it as a function of daily life. We learned to worry only about the probable, not the possible.
BTW, we had a local "dirty old man" when we lived out in the country. Girls knew that going near his place was a bad idea, and he knew that if he touched a local family's daughter and she told, he would get beaten to a pulp by her father or brothers. Local law enforcement knew about this; he got beaten every so often, and the sheriff was fully aware of that. If someone had shot him to death, the sheriff would have pretended not to know who did it.
I'm an strictly urban person.
Of course it varies depending on where youre from. This sort of thing isnt a big deal in the south. But further up north (canada for example), you'd get thrown in jail!! 
