The newest estimates of guns in American’s hands are now at 390 million, larger than our population. Not the adult population—the entire population. If you’re like me, you see this as a good thing, because guns are a good thing. They represent freedom, independence, safety, more things than I plan to list in this short space. A person who asks why you need a gun, or why you need so many, is so far behind the eight ball where do you begin? Why do you need so many shoes? In a free country like America, who tells you how many shoes you’re “allowed” to have? That goes double for constitutionally protected property.

The fact that this nation is now seeing more vicious immoral street crime than we had in the days of Eliot Ness and the Untouchables, the 1920s during alcohol prohibition, puts the lie to so-called “gun control.” We had no such thing back then. There were absolutely no federal “gun-control” laws until 1934, if you overlook a few minor hunting regulations in National Parks (the first was 16 USC §26 in Yellowstone). We had no background checks, or paperwork, registration of any kind, or age limits. People simply went into stores, like the Five & Dime (also known as Woolworth’s), or local hardware shops, and bought whatever they wanted. Including machine guns.

Today as you’ve read a million times, we’re drowning in laws enacted at the federal, state, and local level to control guns. A fat lot of good that has done! Every criminal of every description has managed to get everything on their Christmas wish list. But—they can’t have any of it—legally. Under so-called “gun control,” criminals can’t even touch or buy or get any kind of gun or ammunition, but as you can see, it hasn’t stopped them. Gun control has failed. It doesn’t work. It is a 100% failure. Murderers laugh at gun control.

What works is law enforcement. Everyone knows this, including the Democrat’s party, who want to gut it. If that isn’t insane, the word insane needs to be redefined. Democrats want to defund police at a time when the failure of gun control is so painfully obvious mass media has almost nothing else on its A-list, night after night. The illogic of banning guns, which the Left is pushing fast and furious, is coupled with an effort to disarm and disembowel police forces. They are having luck with that too. Police are quitting and departments have essentially been neutered nationwide. You folks in Dillon’s audience who wear the blue know of what I speak.

No, what needs a new definition is so-called “gun control.” This duplicitous relatively new scheme (not many decades old) is a method for controlling the public, and increasing government power. It has nothing to do with stopping crime. Here’s a basic truth, remember this: Gun control is not crime control. We have tons of the former, way too little of the latter.

Gun control is now uncontrol.

So why are criminals and malfeasants using their guns with such wild abandon, and such frequency? Without any semblance of stealth, or concern for innocents around them—even their own neighbors and children—they set day and night alight with gunfire. Wasn’t murder a clandestine thing? Has “gun control” become uncontrol? Although the media would have you believe crime is rampant, that’s a Big Lie if ever there was one. Criminal shootings aren’t happening in American cities, or even Democrat-controlled cities, as the Right likes to frame it. It is happening in certain limited, select urban neighborhoods. The demographics are publicly available if you care to check (but not made clear by cable or broadcast “news” outlets). This isn’t a suburban problem. It isn’t a rural issue.

No, what’s missing is that much-maligned, flatly rejected, looked-down-upon and denigrated old American sense of morality, and ethics, and sense of family values, and yes, even religion, and The American Way.

These have been so stripped out of our lives and our culture that even Olympic athletes don’t honor the nation that got them to the podium when they manage to get there. With such abysmal self-esteem, such a vacuum for recognizing what has value, and such constant drubbing from so-called “entertainment” on mass media, it’s no wonder that some people crammed into inner cities just parade around shooting each other and anyone else in range.

So-called “gun control” isn’t working, and doesn’t work. For you though, gun control is practicing, with new and better gear, so you’re a better shot, if God-forbid, you ever need it in a desperate situation. You have the Second Amendment to protect your right to do that. Every effort to deny that to you, that’s the crime.

Award-winning author Alan Korwin has written 14 books, ten of them on gun law, and has advocated for gun rights for nearly three decades. See his work or reach him at GunLaws.com.

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This article was published in the September-October edition of the Blue Press, the commercial catalog for Dillon Precision, the national leader in the manufacture of reloading equipment based in Scottsdale, Arizona.  It is reprinted with permission from the author.