How would you picture, in a perfect world of course to somehow not equate locking your guns up for fear of theft and locking your guns away for fear of "people knowing?"
Security of our firearms will always be an issue. There's little that we can do to control the criminal element in society. Even if we could, the gears of change would be slow. The fact that we do take the extra means to secure our firearms makes us that much more credible to those whom have not formed a concrete opinion based on misinformation, fear, and mass hysteria. Of course there will always be those who will not listen to reason.
There’s a difference between cautioning people not to give too many details regarding what you have for guns and admitting that you’re a shooter.
I think that this sums it up pretty well.
If we're in the "closet", we've put ourselves there. I think that it is a fair assessment to say that the majority of the stigma comes from two places; politicians and the media. It's been said on this forum before that we shouldn't tie a political affiliation to our RKBA. I believe that this sound logic.
Here's something to look at. The biggest single face in the shooting world is the NRA. Whether you like, dislike, agree, or disagree, they're a major player in the RKBA. If I have my numbers right, there are roughly 4.3 million members? Total gun ownership is roughly 80 million... give or take a couple million? So, there are over 75 million gun owners out there that don't join for one reason or another. How much of that social stigma? How much is apathy?
Ask yourself one question and answer it honestly. If all 80 million joined and all 80 million sported the "I'm the NRA and I vote" bumper sticker, how would the stigma situation look then? If one in four cars had that bumper sticker, would we feel isolated? Some would due to where they live, but on average how would that work out? How would the demographics look then? If we concede that our NRA bumper stickers raise our odds of being robbed, shouldn't we also concede that more gun ownership equals more crime? If every gun owner joined, we could no longer say that they're politically biased can we? Would that help or hurt the stigma? Okay, so that was more than more than one question...
Just something to think about.