I still hunt and shoot sporting clays on a regular basis, and whenever I return from the range or from hunting, I clean my shotguns on newspapers spread out over the dining-room table. I use the opportunity to reinforce the rules for the proper handling of firearms to my three young children. I want my children to treat firearms as objects of respect, not of lust. I do not want them to fetishize these tools.

Because the second and much harder thing we need to do is to shift the gun culture in America. I have written before about how the gun culture I have observed develop since the September 11 attacks—the emphasis on tactical weaponry, the marketing of ceramic plate carriers and Kevlar helmets to civilians—is so very different than the gun culture I grew up with in East Tennessee in the 1980s, when the seemingly ever-present firearms were mostly shotguns for hunting and bolt-action rifles.

I bought a used rifle not too long ago, and the federal firearms license-holder to whom I had to temporarily transfer the rifle—I now live in the District of Columbia, where all firearms must first be registered with the police—told me her other customers were fascinated by it. Indeed, on a rack mostly filled with semiautomatic 9-mm pistols people were waiting to pick up, my rifle stood out: a single-shot, break-action rifle chambered for big game. About as far away, in other words, from a Glock or AR-15 as you can get.

My wife, who grew up in the suburbs of New York without any firearms in her home, tells me that I am fighting a losing battle. She tells me it’s impossible to recapture a more responsible approach to firearms.