Short of forced confiscation or a major cultural shift, our great-great-great-grandchildren will live side-by-side with the guns we have today and make tomorrow. That also means that we’re far closer to the beginning of the plague of mass public shootings with military-style weapons than we are to the end . Little wonder that major companies are now including mass shootings in their risk to shareholder filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Common-sense gun control measures can and do reduce accidental gun deaths and injuries, domestic violence-related deaths, homicides and suicides. Failure to enact nationwide mandatory comprehensive background checks, safe storage rules, red flag laws and robust licensing systems like those passed in Massachusetts is political negligence that will flabbergast future generations. How could they have allowed the sale of those weapons to civilians in the first place? Why didn’t they do anything about it after the mass murders began?

Laws that make it safer for Americans to coexist with weapons won’t remove the contamination of military-style weapons from society, but they will certainly save some lives.

Not only is confiscation politically untenable — the compliance rates of gun owners when bans are passed are laughably low. The distribution of these weapons across society makes even their prohibition nearly impossible. In 1996, Australia launched a mandatory gun buyback of 650,000 military-style weapons. While gun ownership per capita in the country declined by more than 20 percent, today Australians own more guns than they did before the buyback . New Zealand’s leaders, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, launched a compulsory buyback effort for the tens of thousands of military-style weapons estimated to be in the country.

For context: In 2016 alone, more than one million military-style weapons were added to America’s existing civilian arsenal, according to industry estimates.