News that the share of American homes with guns has been declining for four decades is best seen as a wake-up call to those who believe in the original principles of the American compact. The New York Times is fronting the news based on data from the General Social Survey, which is a data collection operation based at the Chicago University. The Times’ analysis of its data suggests that gun ownership has, as the Times puts it, “fallen across a broad cross section of households since the early 1970s” in cities and rural areas and all regions of the country. What it calls the “household gun ownership rate” has plunged to 34% in 2012 from more than 50% in the 1970s.

This plunge is a shocking and dangerous development in a nation whose system of government was framed on an understanding that widespread, private gun ownership was one of the struts of liberty. The dispatch in the Times, a shrewdly crafted scoop, notes that the findings “contrast with the impression left by a flurry of news reports about people rushing to buy guns and clearing shop shelves of assault rifles after the massacre last year at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.” It reckons the declining ownership rate “suggests that even as the conversation on guns remains contentious, a broad shift away from gun ownership is under way in a growing number of American homes.”

Doubt about the General Social Survey’s finding on guns is, the Times reports, being voiced by the National Rifle Association. The paper quotes one of its spokesmen, Andrew Arulanandam, as pointing to “reports of increased gun sales, to long waits for gun safety training classes and to the growing number of background checks, which have surged since the late 1990s, as evidence that ownership is rising.” But it quotes Thomas Smith of the General Social Survey as saying he is confident of the trend, which the Times quotes Mr. Smith as saying lines up with what the Times calls “the decline of hunting and a sharp drop in violent crime.”

In any event, the Times reports that the trend “raises questions about the future politics of gun control.” The way it poses the question is this: “Will efforts to regulate guns eventually meet with less resistance if they are increasingly concentrated in fewer hands — or more resistance?” By our lights it’s a good question, one that invites a reconsideration of the strategy being pursued by those of us who believe that the Second Amendment is the “palladium” of our liberty. It’s not enough to speak of gun “rights,” as important and fundamental and, in our view, unambiguous as they are under our Constitution.

Rather, what is suggested is the need for a strategy that focuses not only on the right to keep and bear arms but also the importance, the civic virtue of doing so. It suggests the need for an educational campaign in respect of the logic of gun ownership, the meaning and role of the militia, and the problem of standing armies. These ideas are widely mocked today, when there is such a widespread admiration for our army and for local police departments. The way to counter that mockery is with education and with public policy. What the Times warns of, after all, is the danger that the right to keep and bear arms can be lost because of the failure to exercise it in the first place.