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What makes you say so? If you assume that the intent of all firearms legislation is to antagonize political enemies, you will rarely be surprised the text of the bills or the outcomes thereof. If you try to figure out how the legislation is expected to stop bad things from happen, you'll frequently wind up puzzled by how anyone could think that's going to work. Surely there haven't been any mass bow attacks of late! Bolt-action rifles aren't exactly the ideal choice for school shootings. Passing legislation that results in doing away with helpful, pro-social hunting and marksmanship programs seems unambiguously bad, unless the goal is to antagonize political enemies, in which case it seems almost perfectly well-suited to the task.
I don't think it's actually the case. The Left wants the Right not to have guns - but not to piss them off. Of course, pissing them off is an added value, but it's not the reason. The reason, depending on the fraction, would be either nobody except the Government should have guns, because nothing good ever comes from any aspect of power not being controlled by the government, or specifically the Right should not have guns, because they are bad people and bad people having guns is scary for the good people. As for "how the legislation is expected to stop bad things from happening", remember those are people who still think socialism is going to work if only you do it right, and releasing criminals from jails is actually the best way to fight crime. Their way of making projections and conclusions is a way that allows that to make sense, so it also allows whatever they think of guns to make sense in the same way.
That said, I think this particular outcome is purely "antagonize the outgroup" scenario, but I disagree that all gun legislation is only that. A lot of it is actually much worse.
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The goal is fewer hunters and making it harder to enter the sport.
Then this is a stupid way to go about that. Hunting is mostly transmitted generationally or through person to person old boys networks, and hunting classes in schools have zippo to do with it. This makes it harder to transmit hunting generationally, but no serious person thinks it actually prevents it(and even while democrats mostly don’t like the kind of people who hunt, they generally don’t want them to actually stop hunting), it’s simply a pain in the ass.
I don’t see it necessary to prevent all transmission of the hobby for the idea to work. They just need to put friction into it such that unless you personally know a hunter willing to teach you, you won’t get exposed to it. The less exposure kids get to guns, the easier it is to convince them that they’re evil death machines. Hunting is a positive exposure to guns being used responsibly as a tool and this undercuts the “scary gun” narratives the anti-gun lobby is pushing.
And my point is that hunting is already transmitted entirely person to person. Moving some bureaucratic stuff out of schools might annoy (some of)these people, but it doesn’t actually affect the rate of transmission because hunters are willing to put up with a lot of bureaucracy to bring their sons and nephews into the hobby. The federal government has tools to seriously reduce the intergenerational transmission of hunting(namely, reducing access to federally owned land by hunters). They aren’t using them and no one expects them to.
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Enough pains in the ass, and you can reduce the number of hunters in the next generation to the point where you can ban it (or its implements) entirely.
The actual end result is that instead of taking hunter's ed classes in school, kids have to go to bass pro shop on an evening or a weekend, which is not a deterrent to serious hunters. It is merely annoying. You can do things to make hunting even more annoying, and democrats mostly don't do them. Public hunting land remains open, including federal land, and hunter's ed requirements aren't getting any longer or less... geared towards their obvious target audience.
And there are functionally no hunters lukewarm enough to be deterred by taking some classes at a sporting goods store with their sons instead of having their son’s school do it. It’s already an opt in activity requiring up-front investment.
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