6 Timelines That Explain America's Persistent Gun Culture

As we start to reopen a national conversation on gun policy in the wake of Friday's shocking mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, it's as important now to understand the geography of guns as the actual trend lines of gun-related crime over time in the past several decades.

A handful of charts paint a remarkable picture of some key shifts over the past 30 or 40 years. During that time, gun violence nationally has declined significantly even as aberrant mass shootings have grown less so; public sentiment for regulating the weapons has fallen steeply, too. Mother Jones has estimated that we’re approaching a demographic reality where our population of firearms will outpace our population of people. But hard data on the total number of civilian-owned guns in America is hard to come by, and so much of what we know on the topic is based upon what gun owners themselves say in surveys.