After mass shootings like the nightmare in Las Vegas, there are always complaints that we don’t talk enough about gun control in America, that we need to actually have the debate about guns and mass murder that the National Rifle Association and the Republicans supposedly keep shutting down.

I don’t think this is right. We do keep having a debate over guns in the United States; it’s just that the side that’s convinced that new regulations will prevent another Newtown or Orlando or Las Vegas keeps on losing the argument.

Twenty years ago, you could argue that gun rights was a strictly minority cause that thrived because of its partisans’ intensity and its lobby’s clout and money. But that’s no longer true. Despite the best efforts of Barack Obama, Democratic politicians and a raft of activists, celebrities and talk-show hosts, despite a dramatic leftward shift on many other social issues and despite wall-to-wall media coverage of mass shootings, gun control is substantially less popular than it was in the 1990s — and gun rights is one of the few issues where the Republican Party is actually in touch with what many Americans seem to want.

Why is gun control losing? One answer is structural. Gun ownership is a form of expressive individualism no less than the liberties beloved in blue America, and it makes sense that a culture that rejects erotic limits would reject limits on self-defense as well. Especially since the appeal of gun ownership is also linked to individualism’s dark side — to distrust of your neighbor and your government, to the decay of communities and families, to a sense of being unprotected and on your own.