This is my attempt at explaining it.
The gun rights movement has never been this strong. AWB94 came off of a long trail of antigun victories such as NFA34, GCA68, and FOPA86.There was much less vocal opposition to the ban. Bill Ruger was the most infamous of the high profile gun people who welcomed it, but there were many others. The NRA did not have its current massive membership numbers, nor did it have Wayne LaPierre. In my opinion, what he did was really push the NRA into being an almost partisan organization in addition to moving it from being a sort of organization for education to being an organization for activism. The hardline stance against gun restrictions did not become a core part of the mission until after Columbine in 1999. The willingness to compromise and work with antis became significantly less after this point. There were also fewer gun rights organizations around, and the antigun movement was at its peak.
At the time, if my sources are correct, then the gun community was very different. What we would consider normal, such as 30 round mags, protruding grips, adjustable stocks, and so on, were not quite so mainstream at the time. Back then, many shooters were what could be termed “Fudds”. There was a clean line between “traditional sporting guns” and “evil assault weapons”. Black rifles were a rather new trend at the time, although they had existed for a while, but there were still rather obscure. Modern gun types such as combat style 9mm’s, black rifles, and other “tactical” arms were much less widespread. They simply were not items in the shooting mainstream. The shooting and gun rights communities essentially did not care. As far as they were concerned, if they got to keep their bolt action milsurp sporters, pump action shotguns, and target pistols at the cost of weapons which were not only unpopular, but also used in massacres and were not in their collections, then it was a win.
The evil gun of the 1990’s was the Kalashnikov. It is foreign. It was designed by a Russian to be used by the soldiers of the Soviet Union. It is not American. It is ugly. It looks intimidating. It is only battle accurate. It was designed to be used as an automatic weapon. It has been involved in almost every single organized armed conflict since the 1950’s. The bad guys of every armed conflict we’re been involved in since the 1960’s have used it. It is not a favorite of competition shooters, hunters, or marksmen. It is an easy weapon to hate.
The evil gun of the 2010’s is the AR15. It is American. It was designed by an American to be used as sporting rifle. It is American. It is pretty. It looks cool. It is exceptionally accurate. It was designed as a sporting rifle. It has been used by Western forces all over the world since the 1970’s. The good guys of every armed conflict we’ve been in since the 1960’s have used it. It is a favorite of competition shooters, hunters, and marksmen. It is much harder to hate a domestic product with such great prominence in so many areas.
Things are very different today. Gun rights have never been more popular and guns have never been more numerous. The years since the turn of the millennium have seen three key shifts. First is what I’d call the tactical renaissance. The markets for modern fighting carbines and fighting pistols are now the single largest thing going in gun sales today and it is only continuing to grow. The Glock pistol and the AR15 carbine started this revolution when policemen wanted to have firearms similar to their duty guns for personal use and when servicemen wanted to own a rifle like the one they had in armed forces. Tactical has become mainstream. The AR and the AK are the most prevalent types of new semiautomatic rifles. These have become the benchmarks for the modern rifle.
The second shift is what I would consider an awakening of sorts for the gun community. There had been previous laws, restrictions, and bans. However, nothing done before had been done to things so common as anything with detachable magazines. The rules of the AWB meant than a very significant proportion of guns would be effected. Couple that with a new generation of shooters, as well as old hands, who want their guns to have protruding grips, detachable magazines, dynamic stocks, and muzzle devices, being told they can’t have them, and you’ve got a recipe for backlash. The gun community understood that it had very nearly lost a massive chunk of real estate forever and did not want such a thing to happen. Thus, there is great resistance toward any attempt to curtail gun rights.
There has been a shift is in who is the gun community. I probably am wrong about some of this stuff. Historically, the gun community would be combat professionals, professional competition shooters, and sportsmen. You had your Carlos Hathcock, Jeff Cooper, and Ed McGivern. The first was mostly strictly business about firearms. The second used them to make a living, but they are few and far between. The third had guns around them frequently, but they were recreational and utilitarian. All of these were shooters for pragmatic reasons. Guns were a part of life; hobbyists and activists were not so common then. Likely few of them ever felt the need for “assault weapons”. The fighters saw threats; these guns could more easily cause them harm. The champions saw toys; they were unproven in the world of competitive shooting. The hunters saw pointlessness; the magazines gave them a ludicrous number of shots, but the calibers were not ideal for what they did. They also tended to be from rural and less affluent areas with smaller populations and less political significance.
However, the gun community has significantly expanded today. More and more people come into it as a hobby instead of as a practicality. These newcomers are much more diverse then the old guard. The largest contingent of new gun owners is female. Ethnic minority groups are well represented, actually owning a disproportionately high number of firearms at a disproportionately high rate of ownership. Very significant proportions of the gun community are affluent people and college grads from all over the nation. These are both very important voting blocs for politicians, being the middle class and the youth, respectively. Chances are that any random voter personally knows at least one or two gun owners, and possibly has been shooting with one. It is difficult to demonize what a man already knows to be fine. Firearms are hardly the domain of old white men in redneckland. Guns, gun rights, and gun ownership, are experiencing tremendous upsurge in popularity. It is a bad political move to go after guns when not only are they treasured by large numbers voters across all demographic groups, but when the gun control movement has never been weaker.
There is also the matter of the success of the Right to Carry movement. The passage of Right to Carry legislation has not only seen statistically meaningful and significant reductions in crime where it is present, but the success has been replicated in diverse instances all over the nation. Allowing citizens to carry arms in public has not led to blood in the streets. The expiration of the Assault Weapon ban didn’t cause blood in the streets. It didn’t do anything to stop criminals.
The Internet has been a wonderful breakthrough for gun rights. On it, people from all over can get together, discuss the issues freely, and share information. In the past, unless there was a gun club or similar function, then connection to other gun people could be quite challenging. Thanks to the internet, there is much less of the idea that you are a gun supporter and the only one who thinks that way. Thanks to foris such as The High Road, Arfcom, TFL, Warrior Talk, M4C, Glock Talk, Gun Rights Media, Firearms Talk, Gunboards, Get Off The X, Gun & Game, and countless others, the community can organize. Gun rights supporters find out that not only that they are far from unique, but that there are other people with whom to communicate and organize.
There are certainly many other reasons why things are different this time around. I definitely missed many and probably made a number of mistakes, but this is the best I could come up with without any more resources than Google and my memory. The bottom line is that the Second Amendment is in a moment of ascendancy and the entire firearms culture has shifted dramatically from twenty years ago.
