I'm not familiar with any cases of a Democratic candidate getting primaried for being too gun-friendly. Obviously it's hard to prove the direction of causation here, but it's my strong subjective sense that it's just become politically toxic to talk about guns positively when the biggest gun rights organization is leaning so hard into culture war nonsense.
So you're saying that the reason there are no pro-gun democrats anymore is not because democrats are very anti-gun, it's because a pro-gun democrat would be associated with the NRA which is "leaning so hard into culture war nonsense"? So basically its republican's fault that there are no pro-gun democrats?
Is it also republican's fault that there seem to be no democrats opposed to putting transgender women into women's sports?
Is it also republican's fault that repeating the n-word in the context of trying to have a discussion with a student about its meaning will get you fired?
Or maybe the better explanation for all this is that democrats have moved substantially to the left?
It's not the fault of Republicans. They're a big political party with positions on a lot of issues. It's the NRA's fault for allowing all these random controversies you're describing to get tied into the gun rights debate.
For a more concrete example, concealed carry has been a large and unambiguous gun rights success story, with shall-issue going from pretty rare in the 80s to near-universal today. What I'd expect an effective gun rights organization to produce is a roadmap for how to convince the holdouts. Illinois passed their shall-issue law with 76% in favor, and Washington has had it for decades; what lessons does this teach us about how to get left-leaning people on board? If a group of California residents wants to convince their sheriff to issue more permits or their assemblyperson to support statewide shall-issue, what should they say? I'd really like to see answers to these questions (please do send me links if you have any!), but as far as I can tell the NRA is wholly uninterested in thinking about them.
> in a lot of circles I'm not comfortable discussing even absolute basic things like "you might want a gun for home protection if you live in a high crime area"
Why not? What will be the consequences for you to state such an "absolute basic thing"?
It would be seen as a strong, disruptive political statement. Some people in my generation have legitimately never heard a pro-gun message other than the weird trolling the NRA prefers on their social media accounts, so when I say "you can take steps to feel safe when there's a burglar in your neighborhood" they hear this guy with his flamethrower: https://fb.watch/3wkI4gq4WM/
