There is a fairly powerful anti-gun lobby in the US. It's managed to get hundreds of laws passed.

When you get down to it, the NRA isn't really what stops most gun control measures from passing though. The NRA has only a few million members--but according to [a recent Gallup poll](http://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx), around 42% of American households own at least one firearm<sup>1</sup>. The NRA just the tip of the iceberg.

The other difficulty that's run into when trying to pass gun control legislation is simple evidence (or lack of it). Despite hundreds<sup>2</sup> of laws, it's essentially impossible to point to any of them having led to even a small (but measurable) reduction in crime. To the extent there's actual evidence (and I'd say that extent is pretty minimal), it seems to indicate that the opposite is true. Years ago, John Lott did a study showing an inverse relationship--i.e., that more ownership and more permissive gun laws generally lead to reduced crime. He's now up to the third edition of [his book](https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660) so he keeps the statistics and such reasonably up to date.

Of course, his conclusions have been criticized, and some of the criticism is undoubtedly fair--but regardless of whether his claims are 100% factually correct, they seem sufficiently well supported for a fair number of people to find them credible, so he's shaped public opinion to at least some degree.

### So what will happen?

I doubt that the anti-gun lobby is going to gain a huge amount of momentum particularly soon. On the other hand, I do think the pro-gun lobby is slowly losing momentum, and (more importantly) supporters.

Both sides have been fighting this for decades now. Both habitually make statements that run right on the ragged edge between distortions of the truth and outright lies. Both routinely treat (even extremely weak) correlation as proof of causation. In short, both sides have given the vast majority of people more than ample reason to ignore most of what they have to say (and it would appear that most people have responded--while mass shootings lead to a small, short-term rise in sentiment favoring firearm control laws, the reality is that most people are probably more concerned about whether there's an accident that will slow their commute this morning than they are about crimes committed with guns<sup>3</sup>.

Nonetheless, there *is* a pretty clear long-term trend toward a higher percentage of the population living in urban areas. That tends to lead to an ever-decreasing percentage of people who hunt, own firearms, or think of firearms as having any real place in their own lives. Eventually, the pro-gun faction is almost certain to become a small enough minority that they'll lose political influence, and laws will be passed that sharply curtail private ownership of firearms.

### What about the shorter term?

There are a few areas where enough Americans currently agree that I'd expect to see more laws passed in the (relatively) near future. For example, a recent [Gallup Poll](http://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx) estimates that 96% of Americans favor requiring background checks for all gun purchases. That's a large enough majority that it strikes me as nearly inevitable that it will actually happen. Smaller but still significant majorities favor requiring a 30-day waiting period for all gun sales, and requiring that all firearms be registered with the police.

### Summary

- Quite a few laws have actually been passed.
- There seems to be essentially no evidence that any of them has been at all successful.
- The single biggest problem for the anti-gun lobby is that they're almost certainly vastly outnumbered by those who own firearms or are at least somewhat friendly to that cause.
- Requiring background checks for all firearms sales seems sufficiently popular that (at least in my estimation) it's likely to happen fairly soon.

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1. And note: that's what's reported. At least to me, it seems likely that the real number is somewhat higher; few people are likely to report owning a firearm if they really don't, but some (e.g., people who own illegal firearms) are likely to say they don't even though they really do.
2. If you want to get technical, the real number is much higher (twenty thousand has been thrown around for decades now), but many of those are local laws that are superseded by state laws (and such) so they have no real effect.
3. I suppose it may sound like I'm painting people as being rather callous toward victims of shooting. A fair argument could be made, however, that the callousness is in very little attention being paid to the fact that well over twice as many people die in traffic accidents as by shooting (~37,000 annually vs. ~13,000 annually).