Perhaps I can lend a slightly different perspective to this.
I'm young. I haven't been around long enough to accumulate any great wisdom on any particular topic. I'm still learning about life, but if there's one thing that I've learned that I believe is correct is that judging a group of people and forming an opinion about them is a nearly impossible task.
Every group of people has its bad apples, and those bad apples tend also to be the most vocal and most visible of the group. I have an example that might be more meaningful to a more liberal person. I'm an atheist. Growing up, even early in college, I had a very deep dislike, maybe even a hatred, for Christians. It seemed like every time I had any sort of interaction with a Christian, I was being told that everything I believed was wrong, that I would be cursed for what I believed, that I was evil, so on and so forth.
I don't hate Christians now. I came to see that they're decent folk, no better or no worse than anyone else. Why? I got to know some of them. The reason that all I heard from Christians was negative and accusatory was because the majority of Christians felt no need to dictate what is right to everyone that they come across. Only the bad eggs thought that was the proper course of action.
The same applies here. I'm frequently frustrated by the same tone that appears on the board that you are. The speak of sheeple, liberals being stupid just because they're liberal, etc. I almost stopped reading THR because of it. Then I applied the same logic to this board that I did to Christians. Sit back and read for a month. Every time you see one of those close-minded comments, take note of the person that said it. Keep track of the number of individuals that say that sort of thing, then at the end of the month, compare that to the number of active users on THR. I'll bet you anything its only a tiny fraction that are responsible.
I won't reccomend you take a trip to the range. If guns aren't your thing, that's fine. I would, however, recommend that you get to know some gun owners. At the very least, walk about your daily life with the knowledge that anyone you talk to, people that don't exhibit the bad apple qualities that bother you and I both, people you respect, could well be gun owners. There are 80 million of us here in America. 1 in 4 people you know probably own a firearm of some sort, even in California.
I used to be quite anti-gun. More so than you, I suspect. It was meeting real gun owners and not judging the group its popular stereotypes and vocal minority that played the biggest part in changing the way I think about firearms.
I just ask you to do the same. I bet you'll find that gun owners are decent folk, no better or no worse than anybody else.