The Bruen decision was a blow to gun control advocates throughout the nation. In one swoop, it became a whole lot hard to pass anti-gun measures and make them stick.

That hasn’t exactly stopped them from trying, though.

What’s more, the Supreme Court is under a certain degree of threat. We have many who want to pack the Court in order to get the results they want–something they’d never tolerate the other side doing, I might add–and others just want to keep passing gun control until the makeup of the Court changes over time.

Yet over at The Gun Writer, Lee Williams brought up something that got me to thinking.

Gun owners should be running the country given our numbers, at least that’s how it appears on paper.

According to Ballotpedia data from last year, of the 31 states that allow voters to publicly indicate their political party affiliation, roughly 48 million were Democrats and 36 million were Republicans. The rest were independents, unaffiliated or members of another political party. By comparison, there are an estimated 133 million gun owners in the country, or roughly 40% of the population — a massive number that dwarfs all party affiliations combined — according to the Pew Research Center.

If gun owners ever voted as one homogeneous bloc, we would be unstoppable. Unfortunately, we all know there are gun owners and then there are folks who own a gun. It’s like the difference between someone with an old Fender in their closet and Angus Young.

When you factor in those who work regularly to support the Second Amendment, the numbers drop off even steeper. This, friends, has always been our Achilles’ heel — complacency — the sense that someone else will do something to save the day. It has done us far more harm than Gabby, Brady or Bloomberg ever will, and it’s time to make a change.

He’s not wrong.

133 million gun owners in this country, a whopping 40 percent of the population. When you consider that at least a significant chunk of that population are kids who can’t lawfully buy a gun, it’s even more telling.

Now, Williams has some great steps people can and should take to try and shift things, and I encourage you to read them, but I’m going to go off on a different tangent for a bit.

See, I can’t help but think about those 133 million gun owners and not recognize that, based on polling data, a significant percentage of them support gun control. Why?

Why would they own guns while supporting anti-gun efforts?

The most likely answer in my book is that they figure that they’re safe, that the new efforts either won’t impact them or, at a minimum, will only inconvenience them a bit.

After all, almost every gun control group maintains they don’t want a gun ban, just a handful of regulations they call “common sense.”

What’s more, they’re bombarded by the media telling them that gun control will solve our nation’s ills. Things are presented in such a way that it seems obvious.

This brings me back to what Williams wrote.

As it stands, the Second Amendment is a partisan issue. It shouldn’t be. Not with 133 million Americans owning firearms. That needs to change.

If the Democrats realize they will lose elections if they push gun control, they’ll stop. We’ve seen it before, actually. For a long time, left-leaning politicians might have wanted gun control, but they knew that there was no chance of it passing and there was no chance of them winning a national election if they pushed it. They knew that swing states would roll red if they tried.

So, they didn’t push it.

We can get that back. We need to get that back and we need to do so badly.