Ross: If more guns actually made us safer, it should have worked by now

President Biden is now pushing for an assault weapons ban, mobilizing the gundamentalists who are convinced the government is coming after your personal weapons.

What neither side wants to admit is that in any situation where everyone has access to powerful firearms, there’s only one way to prevent the horrors we’ve seen in the past week. And that’s to have a population where there is no untreated mental illness, and where every male child is raised in a loving, stable home, so that he matures into a disciplined, well-adjusted adult who you would trust with a military weapon.

Firearm confiscation, whether you fear it or support it, is not going to happen. That’s physically impossible in a country where 90,000 firearms are sold each day.

Shooting incidents – and media coverage of them – only increase sales. So do the feelings of insecurity caused by crises like COVID and the anti-police demonstrations, so much so that gun sales during just the first six months of 2020 hit 19 million.

And the biggest surge in sales, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, was among Black Americans, up 58.2%. So it’s across racial lines – a lot of Americans truly feel personal weapons will make them safer.

Logically, if personal weapons actually did make us safer, it seems to me it should have worked by now. According to the Brookings Institution, there are currently about 400 million guns in circulation in the United States.

But maybe it takes 800 million to feel really safe. No one knows. What I do know is that the way gun sales are going, if more guns really do make us safe, the United States is on track to achieve complete safety long before anybody else.

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