As I was reading through the Washington Post/Ipsos survey results on AR-15’s, I wasn’t finding much that was surprising. Men are more likely to own them than women. Middle-aged men are the most likely owners. Whites are overrepresented. Ownership is more common in rural areas, the South, and in states that voted for Trump. But then I came to something that did give me a shock.

Taken together, the polls find that 6 percent of Americans own an AR-15, about 1 in 20.

The data suggests that with a U.S. population of 260.8 million adults, about 16 million Americans own an AR-15.

I wasn’t prepared for 16 million AR-15 owners in the United States of America. That’s a sobering number. On the plus side, that demonstrates how many people own the weapon and don’t use it to shoot up concerts, elementary schools, college campuses, shopping malls, gay night clubs, black churches, Sikh temples and synagogues. On the minus side, that’s an absurd amount of firepower in the hands of people, most of whom have little legitimate use for it.

A strong plurality (33 percent) of respondents to the survey said they owned an AR-15 for self-defense but only three percent said it was to protect against government tyranny or societal “chaos.” Twelve percent said they use it for hunting and another 15 percent for fun, sport and recreation.

I’m not sure what percent own them for the basic purposes of firearms on a western ranch, like controlling predators and pests. If you live somewhere with bears and cougars, you might want a powerful gun just in case. There are legitimate uses for semiautomatic rifles, but I’ll just say this. I looked several times at the link to the Washington Post’s story on what the AR-15 does to the human body without having the courage to click on it and read it.  When I finally opened the article, here is what greeted me:

The AR-15 fires bullets at such a high velocity — often in a barrage of 30 or even 100 in rapid succession — that it can eviscerate multiple people in seconds. A single bullet lands with a shock wave intense enough to blow apart a skull and demolish vital organs. The impact is even more acute on the compact body of a small child.

“It literally can pulverize bones, it can shatter your liver and it can provide this blast effect,” said Joseph Sakran, a gunshot survivor who advocates for gun violence prevention and a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

“During surgery on people shot with high-velocity rounds, he said, body tissue “literally just crumbled into your hands.”

This kind of force might be necessary if your house is being attacked by a squad of ninjas, but otherwise it’s the dictionary definition of overkill. It must be fun to fire this weapon and 9 percent of survey respondents (an estimated 1.5 million Americans)  said they owned the AR-15 because “they like how it looks.” I have to ask, though, how many of them like what it does to a 9-year old student’s body?

Despite being in the prime demographic for AR-15 ownership (white male in my fifties), I can’t understand why so many Americans possess the weapon. Maybe that’s because I’m from the Northeast where only 10 percent of AR-15 owners reside despite having 17 percent of the country’s population. Maybe it’s because I’m a Democrat. Democrats make up 27 percent of the population but only 10 percent of AR-15 owners. Maybe it’s because I live in a low crime area with virtually no apex predators.

Still, I would argue that there are precious few people whose need for a weapon can’t be satisfied by something less lethal than an AR-15. I really have no sympathy for the argument that you need one because you like how it looks. I was actually surprised that so few people cited potential societal breakdown or governmental tyranny, because those are the only reasons I might consider owning one myself. If people are suddenly unable to secure food or other basic necessities and law and order breaks down, we could face something akin to a zombie apocalypse movie, and then you might very well wish you had an armory to protect yourself, your property and your family. Or, I can imagine a situation where something like Donald Trump’s coup attempt succeeds and it’s necessary to fight to restore our representative democracy. Maybe it’s too late at that point to go to the gun store.

Having been through the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and January 6, I don’t scoff at end-timers the way I used to. The aggression we’ve seen from Russia, and now possibly China, gives me great pause about the potential for nuclear war. The coming disruptions from climate change add to my concern. But only 3 percent of AR-15 owners directly cite these types of reasons as rationales.

What’s strange is that so many people don’t see that we’re living through a kind of apocalypse already, and it’s because we have a non-stop number of mass shootings with AR-15’s. Do people like dropping their kid off at school not knowing if they’ll ever see them again? Do they like going to a concert and having to plot their escape route? Not too long ago, we didn’t live like this.

But 16 million Americans now own an AR-15, and there doesn’t seem to be the political will to do anything about the widespread availability of this weapon.