A slight majority of Americans still defend the rights of everyone, including the mentally ill, to own and even stockpile firearms with a minimum of regulation.

That will change, I believe.

Tea Party extremists and other gundamentalists are less and less vocal on public social media. They don’t like answering questions like this:

The New York Cop Killer Was Arrested 19 Times. Why Was He Able to Get a Gun?

Washington State is the most progressive.

Two years after the Newtown shooting, the gun-rights lobby still holds the edge when it comes to gun policy in America.

On the federal level, gun-rights groups, led by the National Rifle Association (NRA), spent roughly twice what gun-control groups spent on national political campaigns and nine times what they paid to lobby Congress, according to data from the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics. …

Don’t Call It “Gun Control”

Advocates have also started to rethink the way they talk about their goals. Today, none of them actually use the term “gun control.” “That’s a phrase that was pointed to as divisive, or didn’t have the right tone or implications,” said Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action.

They talk instead about “gun safety,” “common-sense gun laws,” or more simply, “keeping guns out of the wrong hands.” They underscore that even as Americans support firearm ownership, 91 percent also want mandatory background checks.

“This framing of pro-gun versus anti-gun, or pro-restriction versus Second Amendment rights, is not a healthy way of looking at this issue if our goal is to save lives,” said Dan Gross, head of the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence. “We need to look at the opportunities that clearly exist to prevent gun deaths and crime while being consistent with the Second Amendment and the desire of law-abiding citizens to own guns.”

PBS Frontline

how criminals get guns :

“Stolen guns account for only about 10% to 15% of guns used in crimes,” Wachtel said. …