LIVE fire crackles from the range at Clark Brothers, a gun shop in Virginia. Inside, the most striking things are the enormous gun safes. Some of these metal boxes, which cost over $1,000, can withstand hours of exposure to wildfires and being dropped from 200 feet.

They are the result of a shift in gun ownership. Surveys suggest that the proportion of American households that own guns has declined from about 50% in the early 1980s to about 35% now. (These figures are subject to sampling error: when men answer the phone they are more likely than women to say there is a gun in the house. But repeated surveys tell a consistent story.)

Even as the number of gun-owners is falling, the number of guns in America appears to be rising. This can only be tracked indirectly—there is no national gun registry and never will be. However, one can look at the number of background checks requested by gun shops, which has risen. This is not a perfect measure, because a background check may not be followed by a sale or, conversely, may be the prelude to the purchase of multiple guns. Another way is to infer sales from numbers collected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which tracks how many guns are made in America as well as imports and exports. Both measures show an increase in the number of guns bought, with a sharp uptick beginning in 2006, when Democrats won control of Congress (see chart). Not all Democrats are anti-gun, of course. When asked how many firearms he owned, Brian Schweitzer, the former governor of Montana, said: “More than I need but less than I want.” But still, the National Rifle Association persuaded “a lot of gun lovers that their rights would be taken away from them by Democrats and they had better stock up while they could”, says Philip Cook, a rifle-owning economics professor at Duke University. Mr Cook estimates that about 5% of owners own most of the guns. Since there are hundreds of millions of guns in America (the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss research project, puts the number at 89 per 100 people, placing the country comfortably ahead of second-place Yemen, with 55), this means that some gun collectors need a lot of storage space. In the old days they might have displayed their guns in a glass-fronted cabinet, but worries about children and theft have made this less popular. Now the fashion is for big safes. For some gun owners the safes themselves have become the thing to show off, their bulk and decoration hinting at the firepower contained within. “Because they are so pretty people are putting them in their front rooms,” says Brandon Payne of Liberty Safe, a safemaker.

The company sells 500 safes a day, most of them big ones and mostly to people with lots of guns: its Fatboy model can hold 64 long guns and a clutch of pistols. Competitors such as Fort Knox and Browning allow buyers to customise the safes with wood-panelled interiors, dehumidifiers and lighting kits on the inside, and biometric locks and artwork on the outside. Such devotion to providing luxurious housing for weapons is a reminder to gun-control advocates of what they are up against.