I think that this is a fair question, and I’ll give it a fair answer as best I can from my POV.
I don’t self-identify as a gun-owner. It’s just one more adjective in a long list of them (asshole perhaps being prominent; Top-10 minimum) that can be used to identify me.
Like many other gun owners, I was raised around them, and taught from an early age that they are just tools. Like many other tools, safe handling and responsible use is necessary to prevent injury/death to the wielder and other nearby people. Like some tools, they require a certain level of maturity and responsibility to safely use, and some mature supervision may be required.
I’ve been shooting since age 5. Shooting .22s under the supervision of my Dad or older brother, various cousins and uncles. It was made known, and sternly reinforced, that guns, just like other tools like rotary saws and such, were NOT to be touched/handled without a responsible adult present.
As such, guns were just another part of life, like cars and screwdrivers and Sunday dinners of fried chicken, green beans, and mash & gravy. There was no mystique to them, no stigma for having them.
This changed in the early 90’s with the election of William Jefferson Clinton as the 42nd President of the United States. The tone…changed…in the media and in public discourse. All of a sudden, certain guns were bad. Not because they were badly made, or prone to malfunction, but because of what they were. And the kind f people who owned those kinds of gun were stereotypically identified with a certain demographic: the white, conservative, christian fundamentalist preoccupied with Red Dawn scenarios, or who were portrayed as self-identifying as wanna-be “Rambos.”
And the tone of the political discourse changed with it. There were politicians and politically active celebrities who were mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore over the gun violence associated with the crack epidemic and ongoing inner-city drug violence. These people used fiery rhetoric to describe the bans they wanted to enact, the guns they wanted confiscated, the actions they wanted to take to get these evil guns and their owners “off our streets.” There were blatantly misleading “News Specials” about “Assault Weapons” and the need to ban these dangerous guns, and the dangerous people who were drawn to them.
In the later part of the 90s, this discussion went nation-wide and public on the increasingly accessible internet. The vitriol that was heaped upon me, well, I haven’t forgotten, or forgiven. And it wasn’t for anything I had actually done, it was for one, single aspect of who/what I am: a gun owner.
For me, it was if I were suddenly public enemy #1 for nothing more than existing, and breathing air. It was like the kind of shocked surprise one might feel from being jumped out of a dark alley, or if you met a complete stranger, said, “Hi,” extended your hand in greeting, only to have it slapped away and to be spat upon.
For over a decades now it has formed an ongoing part of an increasing cultural divide, most often bitterly rancorous. People will ask seemingly innocent, innocuous questions, only to rip off the mask of civility and start making allusions to penis size, deep-rooted psychological issue, racism, fascism, religious fundamentalism, and on-and-on in this vein.
But…
But, a kind of cultural/political crossroads has been reached, and a corner may be turned. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled favorably (but by a thin margin) on the “individual right” interpretation of the 2nd. Ad. Gun ownership is at an all-time high in the U.S, and it appears to cut across all demographics: urban/suburban, race, sex, income, etc., everyone, to some degree or another, are getting guns.
Obama’s campaign website (for the 2008 election) stated that he wanted to renew the lapsed Assault Weapons Ban, as well as enact “other, reasonable gun control measures.” Shortly after his taking office, AG Holder floated an idea for a renewed AWB, only to have the idea dropped and never mentioned again almost immediately.
Meanwhile, Hizzoner-Duh-Mayor Bloomberg in New York City (now ably assisted by Chicago city mayor Rahm Emanuel) leads the crusade to continue pushing for gun bans and increased gun control legislation.
AG Holder formulated and enacted a scheme known as “Operation Fast & Furious” to knowingly turn a blind eye and deliberately allow dubious gun purchases in states along the Mexican border, supposedly to “trace the flow of illegal guns” into Mexico and into the hands of the drug cartels. In reality, we were innundated with the statistic “90% of illegal guns in Mexico originate in the U.S.A.,” one U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed with one of those guns, and who knows how many Mexican nationals have been hurt or killed with them.
And we gun owners are told once again that we must compromise for “public safety.”
I don’t think people like Czarcasm or Elvis understands the meaning of the words compromise; or there definition is that they get what they want, and we have to suck it.
Because from where I stand now, and have stood for 2+ decades of firearm ownership, they haven’t ever given anything up with the passage of any gun control law: only us gun owners.