RX, you've made it abundantly clear you believe the notion of anti-gun folks being disarmist is kookery, and that we should stop mentioning it.
What I find to be "kookery" is the notion that there are only either "anti-gun folks" or "pro-gun" folks. I know Deanimator's universe is binary, but the reality is quite a bit more nuanced. If we took the "you're with us 100% or you're out" mentality, the actual number of people in the US that fully believe that every adult living in the US have the unrestricted ability to own and carry any type of armament possible is likely only a few percent.
Almost all of us think felons and people in jail should be disarmed, as well as the insane. Most everyone is okay with not being able to own nerve gas, too, But all that is "arms control", and none of it is delineated in the Constitution. And we haven't even gotten to background checks, mag capacity and flashhiders.
The people who are just over that blurry line are also all over the place in what they care about, and a huge number of them don't want to ban guns at all. If they did you wouldn't see UBCs passing in states just a few years after concealed carry. CCL laws passed many states because not many of the so-called "antis" cared enough about voting against it.
I don't care about what is "PC", though these discussions are rich in the usual pro-gun version of political correctness. All I'm preaching is that prevailing attitude I see most loudly repeated is insular, self limiting and self defeating. It isn't the compromise thing; some of you can't even speak to people who believe things different from you without seeming like militant paranoid extremists, rather than citizens of the most free country on earth. You are the absolute WORST salesmen of your POV I could imagine and simply play to an uneducated and close-minded sterotype that is easy for people to simple ignore.
Stereotypes are a thing, and a useful thing at that from a debate/persuasion angle, so three or four categories to watch for & approach in different ways would indeed be useful for conducting strategic discourse.
Stereotypes are only useful if they accurately reflect a real mindset, and I don't see any of the stereotypes offered in these threads even remotely like the people I've known living all over the country. And
that plays into the liberal stereotype that right-wing gun owners are high school educated xenophobes who have never traveled or lived anywhere but small rural communities with a single homogeneous culture.
If you want a stereotype that is useful to think about, imagine a couple with two kids that lives in suburban Iowa. Their parents had guns but didn't use them often, and neither grew up interested. On the news they see stories about all sorts of screwed up people killing people that look like them or their children. The violence seems to sometimes come out of nowhere, and they don't understand how an immigrant with a good job or a popular teenager would suddenly kill a bunch of their friends and co-workers, and it makes them feel sick and helpless because they know they can't put an armed guard everywhere their kids are going to be. And then someone asks them to "close the gunshow loophole". Do you think those people hate guns, hate you, want to be slaves or take away grandpa's shotgun? They don't, but they still are voting against you, and telling them that they are "holocaust denying racists" like Deanimator would is not a useful argument.
Our side needs to start rapping their heads around the fact that the people we are fighting don't all hate us, are often more educated, have traveled more, have read more and absolutely don't see everything in binary.
