Tipping Point
Beerslurpy (great name - I wish that the stores would offer them) and ElTacoGrande:
I agree that the adoption of CCW on a large scale is a series of events that is very much in our favor, for several reasons:
First, literally millions of people nationwide at least have the ability to be armed in most places so, as you've mentioned, it is a big experiment to show whether the country becomes the OK Corral vs. showing that law-abiding people stay that way with a gun in their possession (i.e. they can resist the demonic possession).
Second, you now have millions of people who almost all are buying new guns and shooting them more, plus their families (and close friends, in many cases) personally know that they're carrying, and therefore that gun owners aren't murderers in waiting and that guns don't possess any volition or special mind-control powers. This doesn't hurt our cause in the least.
Third, many of the carry guns have magazines that are "high capacity" according to the definition in the thankfully defunct AWB. Those people won't be very pleased to have their property rendered unusable or illegal, nor to have the possibility of an easy and cheap replacement for those magazines vanish into thin air.
However, there's another factor, one which neither of you discussed, which is acting as its own tipping point regarding conservative vs. liberal politics. It is the Roe v. Wade decision. Of course, Roe as a USSC decision alone has no effect on the gun issue. However, what has the effect of Roe been? IOW, who is getting abortions, and who isn't? Logic suggests that the big city liberals and their useful idiots (big city poor of all ethnic groups) are having fewer children in general, and less since 1973, whereas the number born to more conservative folks has probably changed very little. Since the political viewpoint of most people isn't appreciably different from their parents (at least once they start paying taxes and worrying about their family's safety), the liberals are losing the population war. This will, IMHO, have an increasing effect as time goes on. Not that I relish the idea of abortion, but historians of the future will point to this as a key reason why the country has turned more conservative. The impact of this on our gun laws can't help but be felt.
So, overall I am optimistic on this issue. Of course, a few incidents combined with a few glib, power-hungry politicians can change the law on a national level in a matter of weeks, but I don't see the NRA and other organizations sitting still for it - those pols in the middle won't be as easily swayed as their early-'90s counterparts were, not with the defeats that the antis suffered.