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And yet, in 2014, 63 per cent of Americans told Gallup that “a gun in the house makes it a safer place to be.” Despite all the new data that’s emerged over the last two decades, that number is actually going up: In 2006, the figure was 47 per cent. In 2000, it was just 35 per cent. On the question of guns, it seems Americans are literally getting more stupid with every passing year. Perhaps this is why Obama often sounds so utterly exasperated when he speaks about it. All in all, more than 30,000 Americans are killed with firearms every year — roughly one 9/11 every month.

I’ve always thought if more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in.

If this were about logic, or statistics, then Obama wouldn’t have much problem getting the better of gun-rights fundamentalists. Indeed, he argues circles around them all the time. (“Right now, people on the No-Fly list can walk into a store and buy a gun,” he declared last month, in one his many memorable riffs on gun nuttery. “That is insane. If you’re too dangerous to board a plane, you’re too dangerous, by definition, to buy a gun.”) But America’s deadly gun fixation isn’t rooted in rationality. As the facts above plainly tell us, it can’tbe.

Instead, it always has made more sense to understand the good-versus-evil apocalyptic narrative peddled by NRA types as a self-destructive cultural holdover from the American revolutionary experience. The Evangelical Christian world view that increasingly dominates the culture of the Republican Party (especially among older white voters) also plays a strong role: As Alan Noble has argued in The Atlantic, a dominant theme in modern Evangelical thought in the United States is the idea that Christianity is under perpetual attack from a militantly secularist society in general, and Barack Obama’s Democratic administration in particular. Without guns, how will Christians keep the horned beasts at bay?