There's a different angle I thought of overnight:
One of the big gray areas in calculating national gun ownership stats is that
America has a sh¡t-ton of households with a nightstand revolver.
Loaded; not locked up. They probably don't even know
where the box of n-6 remaining shells went to.
If they ever had one.
And these guns don't age-out the way we'd imagine.
The Man of the House bought it and stashed it
ages ago.
Pre-68; quite possibly the 1950's, or when he got back from the War.
But even when he stops coming down to breakfast,
Granny all too often
keeps the gun.
Because the neighborhood ain't what it was when they bought the house a lifetime ago,
and the love of her life is no longer there to protect her.
So now she's
really afraid of
Murder Rape Burglars.
And all those homes with a humble bedside wheelgun
include a
metric sh¡t-ton of inner-city households.
They have the same concerns as anyone else, in spades.
The cherry on top is that
maybe it's more likely that
their gun was bought on a streetcorner
from someone who said it "fell off the truck".
Not because the buyer intended to use it in muggings.
But because everybody knows somebody,
and maybe the sales guy at Sears in the Fens, or the hardware store,
gave the buyer a dirty look when he started browsing the gun counter -
because We don't need Those People to have "more" guns.
And if the household suspected the gun maybe came from
a burglary or warehouse shrinkage,
then even if they had second thoughts,
they were
not going to invite The Man into their life
by trying to surrender it to the cops.
Maybe move it from the bedside to under the quilts on the closet shelf.
It's still in the house.
In
Mass those people are statistically still sucking for Donk pols.
They're not armed because they want to
join BLM/Antifa riot/loot/burn mobs,
or someday hunt down the two houses on the block that vote GOP and lynch them.
They're not losing sleep over the "contradiction"
any more than they're losing sleep over that time in the 70's
that they scratched someone's car when parking at the mall
and bailed instead of leaving a note.
It's just firewalled in their brain.
BTW, if the Soros Deep State decides to
really push more gun control,
they might try an MSM full-court press to
guilt the casual owners
into giving them up.
But if (say) the coronavirus lockdown ragtime has poisoned Joe Sixpack's
trust in the Ruling Class, that guilt trip campaign may not bear much fruit.