When will we examine our heavily armed gun culture?

http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20150518-john-traphagan-when-will-we-examine-our-heavily-armed-culture.ece

In the past few years, Americans have witnessed shootings at a movie in Colorado, a 3-year-old shooting and killing his father in Indiana and, most recently, nine people killed in a fight among biker gangs in Waco.
Amazingly, Americans seem to see these regular incidents as normal. It’s a powerful and sad testament to how anesthetized we have become to this ongoing violence. And despite all of this violence and loss of life, many in Texas and elsewhere want to increase gun ownership and allow people to openly carry firearms.
Since 9/11, Americans have been deeply concerned about threats to national security. Our tendency has been to define national security only in terms of external threats. A much better way is to see national security is in terms of the well-being of our population. If we think of it this way, the evidence is clear — a heavily armed population in the U.S. is not secure because our culture does not seem to lend itself well to allowing the proliferation of guns.
There are many law-abiding American gun owners who do not go out and kill people and who keep their guns stored safely. But as a whole, Americans do not seem to be able to handle gun ownership in a way that permits maintenance of a civil society. The reality is that the significant numbers of bad apples have spoiled it for those law-abiding gun owners, and it’s time that gun rights organizations such as the National Rifle Association recognize this and begin working with those who want realistic gun control laws, in part as a way of building trust with those who do not own guns.
It’s the one thing we agree on: a desire for a safe and secure society.
Often, those against gun control argue that if you take away the guns from regular people, only the criminals will have guns. Thus, people need to be armed in order to protect themselves. This has not proved true in countries such as Australia, Japan and South Korea that have fairly recently enacted strict gun control laws.