Indeed, law-abiding people are profoundly affected by our gun-control laws - the lack of them.
I am not normally a pessimist. But when it comes to guns, I think we've lost our opportunity to reverse their proliferation.
It's not just the lack of elected leaders willing to take on the all-guns-at-all-costs crowd.
It's the reality of so many guns in our midst now - some 280 million in a nation of a bit more than 300 million people, enough of them with mental illness or anger problems or relationship issues to almost guarantee more of the easily executable violence we've seen again this spring.
We had our chances. We had an era of high-profile assassinations followed by a debate about handguns - how the easily concealable firearms do little more than facilitate the killing of human beings - and that went away, and millions of handguns went into circulation. We had a debate about assault weapons, and a ban on them for a while; that went away, and more of them went into circulation. Gun sales generally have been on the rise since last fall.
To try and roll all this back is to try and dam the ocean with a tennis racket.
It goes on and on.
Just as I write this Monday, the Cecil County sheriff's office reports that a woman in Elkton "out of the blue" shot and wounded the man she married less than three weeks ago, then fatally shot herself. In Pikesville, about 3 in the afternoon, someone shoots a maintenance worker at an apartment complex, in view of students from Old Court Middle School nearby.
We can keep arguing about this - that it's people, not guns, that cause all the violence. But guns make it easier for disturbed people to kill their spouses or children. Guns are behind most of the gang terror in America, and guns make the mass killings possible. There are some 280 million guns. We're a nation assured of more violence, and we're not even debating this anymore.
