You could not ask for a sadder display of how America’s gun culture has begun to whittle away our other freedoms than the attack on the Fourth of July celebration in Highland Park, Illinois.

A 21-year-old man with an assault rifle opened fire on the parade, killing seven spectators and orphaning a 2-year-old boy. Three dozen people were injured, hundreds are in mourning, and thousands will never celebrate Independence Day the same way again.

While Highland Park captured the most media attention, all in all, 220 Americans were shot and killed over the holiday weekend. That doesn’t include five people who survived being shot during the fireworks after an Oakland A’s game—hit by stray, apparently celebratory bullets from a high-powered rifle fired outside the ballpark. Or two police officers shot—again perhaps by accident—at the Fourth of July fireworks display in Philadelphia. In a grim, resigned statement that seemed to sum up the bloody holiday, Mayor Jim Kenney said, “We live in America, and we have the Second Amendment, and we have the Supreme Court of the United States telling everybody they can carry a gun wherever they want. This is what we have to live with.”

It feels like an inflection point in the balance between the right to bear arms and the right to, well, do just about anything else. The triumph of guns is throttling American public life, chipping away at our experience of school, shopping, protest, celebration, debate, electoral politics, and even the writing of laws.

You’d be hard-pressed to find an institution in this country that isn’t buckling under the weight of a gun fetish that has seen domestic firearms production triple since 2000 and a steady rise in mass shootings, as right-wing courts and state legislatures repeal rules and politicians and gunmakers stoke fears of tyranny and civil war. America now has more guns than people, according to one estimate.

For some people, the growing presence of guns in American community spaces represents the very essence of freedom. For many of us, though, they’re an assault on the social contract, a threat that undermines our freedom and confidence to go about our lives long before anyone pulls the trigger. The ubiquity of guns, and the we way contort ourselves and our institutions to accommodate it, is debilitating enough.

Guns on Parade (Slate)