We are the only country in which guns outnumber people — a fact that came true in 2009. Yet, we keep manufacturing more and more guns.

“If every private citizen had the right to carry a musket, a thousand people would've shot Patrick Henry by now, am I right?”

President Obama said a lot about guns in his teary press conference Tuesday, but the one thing that he is not saying, despite all the howling from the right, is that he intends to take away Americans’ guns. Yet equally significant is the realization that individual citizens are unwilling to free themselves of the destructive weapons that are wreaking havoc on our society. Numerous Americans care more about their individual freedoms than our collective freedoms, and they are unable to see how these individualistic desires undermine the essential fabric of a democracy.

For most of the last two centuries, Europeans have been puzzling over their American cousins’ totemic obsession with guns and their passion for concealed weapons. And back in the decades before the American Civil War, several British visitors to American shores thought they’d discerned an important connection: people who owned slaves or lived among them wanted to carry guns to keep the blacks intimidated and docile, but often shot each other, too.

Everyone knows Bernie Sanders is a liberal. But there's one issue the self-described "democratic socialist" isn't so liberal on: guns. Now, Sanders isn't — as some people have described him — a "gun nut," but he does have a mixed voting record on gun policy. As a former representative and now senator of the very liberal Vermont, Sanders has swung to the left on many issues, particularly the economy and health care. But guns are one issue his rural state, with its relatively high levels of gun ownership, is moderate on — since so many residents use firearms for hunting and sport.

Last week, Governor Mary Fallin of Oklahoma admitted that her state had misled the United States Supreme Court. In a brief statement issued hours before the scheduled execution of Richard Glossip, Fallin said that she was granting him a 37-day stay “due to the Department of Corrections having received potassium acetate as drug number three for the three-drug protocol.” The state last spring assured the Supreme Court that it stood ready to execute Glossip with a three-drug cocktail consisting of “midazolam, followed by vecuronium or recuronium bromide, then potassium chloride” a different drug with different effects.

Last Friday, the powerful United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a decision evaluating the constitutionality of a ten-part gun control law. Two of the three judges upheld six parts of the law while a dissenting judge would have upheld all ten. The most important provision that was struck down limited the number of handguns a resident could register to one per month. The judges basically held that the Second Amendment cannot tolerate any limitation on the number of firearms Americans are allowed to possess.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has no idea why the 14th Amendment happened. Huckabee told radio host Michael Medved that the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which denied citizenship to black Americans, is still the "law of the land" — in an attempt to show that it's okay for people to ignore Supreme Court rulings (particularly the June marriage equality decision) that they disagree with. "Michael, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 still remains to this day the law of the land, which says that black people aren't fully human," he said. "Does anybody still follow the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision?"