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While offering broad agreement, I will offer some slight pushback on this. Liberal women have not reasoned themselves into the fear of firearms, but I will say that I've had luck persuading a couple of them to be much less afraid by having a conversation about why I have guns and taking them shooting. You can't fix everything all at once, but people can be won over on guns by being a gun nut that isn't actually a nut.
Yawn yawn yawn. Wow, sure is amazing that all of your opponents (or the women anyway) are irrational idiots who will find their way to your correct opinion with some gentle guidance. Anyway, how is 'why you have guns' at all relevant to a policy discussion. Policy is made for aggregates, no-one should care on more than a personal level why you in particular have guns.
Dial down the snark.
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True enough. I've had the same experience. A 3rd date trip to the range with white woman who is simply following her social consensus has produced many positive effects, not only in the realm of gun control. The trick is to find an upscale indoor range that is pistol-caliber only (for the noise), and bring a quiet 22LR rifle. That's not exactly reasoning them out of it, that's providing them with an alternate emotional experience to counter previous emotional experiences.
Shooting a 22LR with zero recoil, find the range half full of kindly grandpas, and interacting with aggressively helpful clean-cut millennial tacticool staff goes a long way. A positive social environment goes a long way to changing the minds of people who form opinions socially.
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Literally every single person I have ever taken shooting has gone at least 30% up the Overton Window towards gun rights after shooting them. Even the "guns should literally be forcibly confiscated from the entire populace" person moved up to "these are probably fine if reasonable checks are in place on issuing them".
This is interesting and I don’t doubt that you’re correct, but oddly enough this was the opposite of my experience with firing a gun. I’m ambivalent about gun control myself, and am certainly far from a gun-grabber, but I will say that my experience going shooting really drove home just how serious guns are and how important it is to line up incentives so that only competent and well-adjusted people end up owning them. I spent the entire time very cognizant of the fact that I had a deadly weapon in my hand and that if I did something incorrectly I could kill somebody with it.
I mean the counterpoint is that ‘lining up incentives so that only competent and well adjusted people end up owning them’ is the one outcome to the US gun debate that will literally never happen, even as it’s theoretically possible and just how things work in eg France and Czechia. The gun controllers are mostly more concerned with annoying the red tribe than keeping guns away from bad actors, civil rights lawyers will pounce on anything with a disparate impact, the red tribe hits defect on the issue because see #1, and few of the people in the gun policy space even care about the actually common bad outcomes.
I guess it's nice to fantasise that all your opponents can be easily dismissed because they just hate you, but that is almost never the case. ERPOs are precisely designed to help reduce the number of poorly-adjusted people with access to guns, but Republicans lose their shit about those too.
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