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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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