Male obsession with firearms and violence combined with an omnipresent abundance of firearms.

You know, conservatives in the US like to pretend that nothing has really changed with our gun culture, but it has, and dramatically.

When I was a teenager and young adult, people didn't talk about open carrying firearms, because they thought it was a bad idea. Activists didn't make a point of running around with guns. Walmart didn't sell cheap firearms easily accessible to even the most casual buyer.

Firearm companies didn't push assault weapons. Didn't glorify them. Didn't romanticize military-style weapons designed primarily for killing large numbers of people.

But I guess that's good business.

Knock-off AR-15s can be mass produced cheaply and sold at a pretty fat profit.

Compare that to an expensive hunting rifle or shotgun people actually use for its intended purpose. I'm not a hunter anymore, but I used to dabble in it mostly to please my dad, and let me tell you something ... Hunting is freaking expensive. Good hunting guns cost at least many hundreds of dollars, and in hunting culture, which once upon a time was synonymous with gun culture, owning weapons well suited to killing large numbers of people just isn't a thing.

I remember being 18 years old and meeting a family friend who had an AR-15. That was wild and weird, because nobody and I mean nobody owned an AR-15 then. I knew how to fire one because I had just returned from Marine Corps training, but I still thought it was weird.

It's not weird anymore.

That's what's changed. Our country is flooded with cheap military-style weapons ill suited to hunting and well suited to killing large numbers of people.

No brainer much?

What do people think is going to happen with all those weapons saturating our country?

I haven't crunched numbers, but I'm willing to bet that the popularization of military weapons coincides with an uptick in mass shootings. Certainly by 2013, people were buying a lot more AR-15s than they were buying expensive hunting rifles.

And you can bet your booty most angry young men aren't all that interested in freezing their asses off in a deer stand, hoping a prize buck might walk by.