And they know that what America is doing right now — letting civilians with zero training buy the same weapons of war — is insanity.

“I’m a combat veteran of two wars, I’ve shot at people with the intent of killing them,” said Joe Plenzler, a retired Marine Corps officer. “And what is going on here in the United States is crazy.”

Plenzler, 50, is speaking up and encouraging like-minded veterans to join the conversation, which, like much of American political discourse, has lost its center. With pressure mounting on lawmakers to act after the mass murder of schoolchildren last month, Plenzler is tired of one-dimensional arguments and says others should be, too.

Mostly, he’s tired of the silence from people like him who want to see meaningful, common-sense restrictions enacted. For that to happen, he said, more people need to speak up who earned their fatigues — instead of buying them online.

Let’s be real. Most American gun owners — the hunters, the folks who carry the night’s cash till to the deposit box after hours, the folks who want something to kill the varmints on their property, the veterans — see the weapons as a vehicle for safety, not harm.

They have no problem with registering them and keeping them locked in a gun safe, and they understand the need for background checks and age restrictions.

But too many are quiet about their agreement on gun control, pushed into the red/blue, one-side-or-the-other nature of this issue. Worried they’d be labeled as “libs.”

And that silence, Plenzler said, is deafening.

Plenzler works with the Veterans Advisory Council for Everytown for Gun Safety to make his point. Other veterans are using social media to show off their gun collections and talk about gun control — proving they can do both.

“The military trains our troops on the use of these weapons for war,” said Heidi Mae Dragneff, 37, a Navy veteran who is now a stay-at-home mom in Virginia Beach.

She’s got plenty of guns in her home collection and shows them off on TikTok. She and her husband take their daughters to the range. They are not anti-gun. They are anti-violence.

When the kids are at school, Dragneff works with Common Defense and writes and speaks to other pro-gun people — especially civilians — about what guns of war can do.

“Military members have to requalify every year on their weapons,” she wrote in a recent Twitter thread. “They go through rigorous [and] serious training on handling their guns. Plus, they don’t get to keep their weapons [with] them. They are stored at the armory [and] issued only upon deployments or training.”

This is the point that civilians who fight any regulation on guns don’t understand, the part that really frustrates folks like Plenzler.

“Civilians, these guys at the gun range, wearing their cargo trousers,” he said. “They never spent a day in the military, and it’s kind of a cosplay fantasy. … They’re inculcating a misguided sense of manhood.”

I spent an evening trying to talk to the cargo-pants guys at shooting ranges across the region. I didn’t get too far. Most didn’t want to have a deep conversation about gun control. The employees at one range were forbidden from talking, so I asked if their friends would talk to me.

“Nah,” one guy at a Virginia range said. “Most of them are in the gun industry.”

Bingo. It’s not about freedom or safety or the Constitution. It’s about the industry.

Plenzler, a 20-year combat veteran of two wars who is higher-profile than the average veteran because of his years as a Pentagon spokesman, publicly ended his membership in the National Rifle Association in 2017 because he didn’t like the direction they were going, supporting a $70 billion industry.

The group holds outsize influence over Congress, which should be ashamed of its lack of urgency today. It took less than what we saw last month to compel federal legislation nearly 100 years ago, in 1934, after gangland violence claimed the lives of too many federal agents and mobsters.

Then-president of the NRA, Karl Frederick, supported restrictions on the most lethal weapons of the time — machine guns and sawed-off shotguns.

It’s not hard to understand why some Americans carry guns for protection as the list of unsafe places only ever seems to grow: concerts, hospitals, temples, grocery stores, fourth-grade classrooms.

Regular gun owners need to be heard in this debate, especially those who understand what assault weapons are actually for — combat.

“We don’t want to overturn the Second Amendment,” Dragneff tells fellow veterans. “We just don’t need weapons of war in the handle of untrained civilians. And I tell them I own guns too, as many on the left do.”