"The selective natures of our fears and furies are, frequently, easily apparent. Had Jan Morgan, a self-proclaimed Second Amendment expert and Tea Party aficionado, had a road-to-Damascus moment after yet another massacre and come out against the sale of, and training with, powerful weaponry capable of killing scores of people in a handful of seconds, then perhaps she would have done something noble. But to shut down her range only to Muslims, using the flimsy rationale that Muslims as a whole adhered to a death-cult agenda, was disingenuous at best. To argue, as did she, and as did the National Rifle Association and its supporters in Congress and in statehouses around the United States, that automatic weaponry's easy availability made the country safer – except when it came to Muslims (in November 2015, one Texas legislator, who was an outspoken supporter of the NRA, argued that Texas couldn't accept Syrian refugees because it was so easy to buy guns there) – was to ignore the horrifying scale of American gun violence.

"It has never been so easy to own guns in America, or to own such powerful guns, as it is in the early twenty-first century. There has never been another time where so much political effort has gone into creating a permanently armed citizenry. And there has never been a period in US history where mass shootings have been more common. Total up all the gun deaths – from mass shootings, attacks on individuals, suicides, and accidents – and you find that every couple years roughly as many Americans are shot dead as the number of Japanese who died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

"Since 9/11, no community in Jan Morgan's home state of Arkansas had been the victim of a gun rampage carried out by Muslim extremists. Meanwhile, the state, with a population of just under three million, had had a huge number of shootings in the years since 2001: in the first decade of the century, the state saw more than four thousand gun deaths, and a homicide-by-gun rate 50 percent higher than the national average. In 2011, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence scored Arkansas at 4 out of 100 points in the implementation of sensible measures aimed at reducing gun violence, and guns were exported from Arkansas and used in crimes elsewhere in the country at a far higher rate than was the case for guns bought in most other states.

"Arkansas also had the thirteenth-highest rate of gun deaths among children. Not that the problem of being killed by guns was limited to that state: In 2014, the research group Gun War News reported that nationally for every American soldier killed in Afghanistan over the previous eleven years, thirteen American kids had died as a result of being shot."