Thank goodness we have the National Rifle Association and the firearms industry to guide us and write our gun laws.

The wise and caring souls who form the gun lobby have told us for years that the more guns we have, the safer we will be. If we listened to them, they reassured us, the numbers of gun-related deaths were bound to get better.

In the aftermath of a school shooting in Iowa that left a sixth-grader dead, five other students wounded, and the 17-year-old shooter also dead, it’s clear the NRA geniuses were right.

The numbers of gun deaths in America keep going up.

Every year.

Every.

Year.

Just 10 years ago, in 2014, there were 33,594 gun-related deaths in the United States. That represented a slight decline from the prior year, when 33, 636 died in incidents involving firearms.

The gun lobby brain trust knew, though, that there was room for growth.

And—once again—they were correct.

By 2022, we had inched reasonably close to 50,000 firearms related deaths per year in the United States. The actual number was 48,830.

The final numbers for 2023 aren’t in yet, but we passed the 40,000 mark in the autumn.

Any way one slices it, that means we have achieved 50% growth in gun-related deaths in only 10 years.

That’s remarkable.

Now, there are cynical souls out there who say that the gun lobby did not do all this for principled, selfless reasons. It is hard to believe that anyone would be so jaded as to think that the people in the firearms industry have anything other than the purest and most benevolent motives.

The most conservative estimates calculate that the U.S. gun industry has a net worth of $28 billion. Other, more expansive calculations peg the number at more than $50 billion.

Those are such trivial sums that it is hard to believe that anyone — even the most amoral and grasping soul — would be motivated solely by greed.

I mean — really — it’s not like there are corruption trials involving the NRA going on in which prosecutors argue that the organization’s top dogs have been bilking members for decades and hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of dollars.

If the leaders of the gun lobby didn’t go around wearing $10,000 suits while they flew from place to place in large private jets, one could easily mistake them for the late Mother Teresa.

No, the efforts of those in and dependent on the firearms industry aren’t driven by avarice or commerce. They’re charitable acts.

As the shooting in Iowa demonstrates, thanks to the NRA, the gun lobby and lapdog legislators around the country who follow the company line, American children have a much different experience than their counterparts in other parts of the world.

In most industrialized nations, children go to school in blissful ignorance. They sit in their classrooms and think about their lessons, the boy or girl seated next to them, a sport they love to play or the movie they saw the night before.

They don’t worry about having a classmate or a former student show up with a gun and start shooting. They don’t fret that they will have to go to funerals for their schoolmates or have their schoolmates attend their funerals.

The NRA decided such innocence — er, ignorance — was intolerable for American schoolchildren.

Because residents of the United States are 20 times more likely to die in a gun-related incident than citizens in other industrialized nations, students here experience education differently.

They get to go through metal detectors on the way to their classrooms. In many places, they walk past armed guards as they stroll through the schoolhouse doors. Many also have the glorious experience of taking part in active-shooter drills.

And many of them get to be part of active-shooter experiences.

The gun lobby sees this as an essential part of the educational experience. The NRA and its foot soldiers believe that having students live and learn in varying states of dread only enhances their growth.

The NRA and the gun industry have spent millions and millions of dollars helping to create a nation and a society in which having a 17-year-old shoot and kill a sixth-grader for no apparent reason no longer shocks us.

How can we ever thank the NRA and the gun lobby for all they have done?

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].