Welcome to THR, Honey & Venom!
If you had to pick a place to come "out of the closet," to use your own phrase on this," THR is one of the better the places to do it. We see the occasional "I'm pro-2A but . . . " thread, and the mods here don't let them get out of hand. They'll shut them down before letting anybody get beat up too badly.
As for me, I'm a mid-40s, mostly conservative, government lawyer. In spite of what I expected in my college days, I'm about as "establishment" as they come, I guess. Still, I'm unhappy with both the Dems & Repubs. I hate the way that they've effectively carved up "the pie" into two pieces, so that nobody else has a chance of getting a slice. In my ideal world, the government would stay out of my bank account and out of my bedroom.
With that said, you've raised an issue that I'd like to address:
H&V said:
When we get called names, told we're all idiots, or cursed at, the gun lobby looks like the kind of big scary armed threat that inspires knee-jerk nonsense gun policy that nobody benefits from.
No, it shouldn't be your responsibility to be patient with is, but it does make a huge difference. Be stewards of a cause when you can. We vote, and we're starting to care about something very dear to you, show us instead of insulting us and we could see the uninformed anti-gun movement dwindle into insignificance.
I won't defend the name-calling from the gun community, for there really is no call for it. That said, I would like to try to explain some of it. Some of the non-productive vitriol is a reaction to the treatment that gun owners receive at the hands of gun control advocates, Dem politicians, and the media. For the past 20+ years of my memory (& perhaps longer), the gun owning community has been treated like a mob of stubborn, unruly & slightly dimwitted children by those factions. They've treated us as though we'd agree with them and give up our guns "if only we understood. . . ." We've been called "bitter clingers." "Knuckle-draggers" is a pretty common term for us, as well. We routinely have our intelligence and our manhood called into question strictly on the basis that we choose to own or carry firearms. Just go to CNN.com and you can find ~20 articles supporting gun control. Read them, and you'll find a very condescending tone in them, one that shows the disdain that the gun control crowd has for us. For them, we are The Enemy.
Twenty + years ago, this was evident when the federal AWB was passed. Gun control supporters claimed they wanted compromise but, in reality, they wanted nothing to do with us. They didn't need our votes, so they wanted no input from us on their "compromise." This reared its head again in the politics surrounding UBCs. Bartholomew Roberts explains this well in his "Why Universal Background Checks are Bad for all of us" (or some similarly-titled) thread.
I, for one, have plenty of Democrat/liberal friends in "places" like Facebook. A few of them are gun owners, but not many. I've offered to take them to the range, help them with gun safety, and attempted to engage them civilly. In return, I've been called everything but a child of God. My liberal, gun-owning friends don't need to be taken to the range. Of my liberal, non-gun-owning friends, not one of them has ever expressed an interest in learning about any aspect of guns, their history, function, safety . . . nothing.
Name-calling doesn't accomplish anything, for either side. As I said, I'm not defending is on the gun-owning side, but I will admit that I do understand it.
