A line of cars snaked around the government office parking lot, down Bendix Road and for up to half a mile along Route 108 in the late morning and the afternoon, as people waited for hours to trade in guns to Howard County police for crisp $100 bills.Even more than the total number of gun owners, the total number of households with guns is affected. Gun-righs fanatics love to claim the 80 million or so gun owners as their own, but nothing could be further from the truth. Most of them are either apathetic towards gun rights or actually in agreement with the gun control side of the argument.
At the end of the day police had recovered 631 guns and at 2:30 had to start turning cars away, officials said. The last time they tried a similar effort in 1995, the total number of guns collected was three.
But even more importantly, the numbers are dwindling. There's the attrition of elderly gun owners dying off as well as the ever-more-popular gun buyback programs providing a safe place for people to rid themselves of their guns and join the ranks of non-gun owners.
The result: an ever more concentrated minority which becomes ever more strident in their protestations of reasonable limitations on their gun rights.
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