At the same time, though, there is something about the problem Americans face on guns that will be more difficult to address, and which does defy legislation, and that’s the cultural side to this. Watching reactions to the Parkland shootings, I am more confident than ever that America has a bigger problem with gun culture than it has with guns themselves.

Now, this is the unfortunate point in the argument where I have to make the disclaimer you often see in op-eds and articles, which is that I myself am the owner of multiple firearms, grew up thinking it not at all unusual that my father’s house had several loaded rifles propped up in the corner of the living room, and first learned to shoot on a single-shot Winchester rifle when I was around eight years of age. When my eldest son was born, in fact, a package arrived (via the U.S. Postal Service) three days later: Enclosed was the same Winchester rifle with which I will someday educate my own sons about the proper handling of and respect for firearms.

But after the September 11 attacks, I spent several years at war and then lived abroad as a civilian for another several years. And when I finally returned to the United States in late 2008, I noticed something different about the gun culture in the country to which I was so eager to return. For one, driving with my mother from our home in East Tennessee to Nashville, I noticed how many billboards on the side of the highway advertised guns. And not just any guns—these were not .30-06 hunting rifles or shotguns, but rather, the kind of tactical firearms, including assault rifles, that I had carried in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why in the world, I thought then, would anyone have a need for such weapons?

At the time, I wrote a lot of what I saw off to canny gun manufacturers preying on the irrational fears among my fellow white Tennesseans of the liberal black president America had just elected. And I’m sure that does explain a lot of it. But as my friend C.J. Chivers and others have pointed out, a bigger shift is in play: The 2004 expiration of the 1994 ban on assault weapons and the post-9/11 infatuation with so-called “tactical” weaponry have combined to drive sales in the kinds of weapons that would have appeared frankly insane for the individual gun owner just a few years earlier.

Many other returning veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, in fact, found such weaponry insane. Yes, the military itself arms teenagers with such weapons—but only after careful selection and intensive training. Former Marine Corps infantry instructor Paul Szoldra noted that the military makes young recruits spend weeks training with their new weapons before they are fully trusted to handle firearms properly. That’s a huge contrast to the position of organizations like the National Rifle Association, which believes that any American citizen should have access to any kind of small arms without any screening or training whatsoever. Retired Army General Stan McChrystal, the patron saint of American special operations, and a man who knows something about small arms, lamented in The New York Times a year ago that “some of our politicians and the people who back them seem to promote a culture of gun ownership that does not conform with what I learned in the military.”