I spent years thinking gun owners were the problem. Then I moved to my hometown.

@dems.with.guns1mo agoSee in graph →

I know what you're thinking — let me address it before the actual question. This isn't a conversion story. I didn't get red-pilled. I'm still the same person who votes left and thinks we need better regulation of gun manufacturers. But I was wrong about gun owners themselves, and I need to say that clearly.

For a long time, I treated gun ownership like it was a marker — a thing certain kinds of people did. The stereotype was easy: rural, conservative, attached to some fantasy of frontier individualism. I lived in cities where nobody I knew carried. Gun owners were abstract. They were the political opposition. They were the reason we "couldn't pass" things, as if they were obstacles rather than neighbors.

Then my mother got sick, and I moved back to the county I grew up in to help care for her. My parents' property is forty minutes from the nearest police station. We had a break-in attempt in 2021 — someone testing doors at 2 a.m. The sheriff took forty-five minutes to arrive. By then, my dad already had his shotgun in hand.

That's when the abstraction died.

I started carrying a 9mm last year. I took a defensive handgun course from a woman who works full-time at a food processing plant and volunteers on the county search-and-rescue team. Half the class were women. We talked about our jobs, our kids, our actual lives — not ideology. One woman there was a hospice nurse who carried because she made home visits in rural areas after dark. Another worked in banking. None of us fit the caricature I'd built in my head.

What got me wasn't the gun itself. It was realizing how thoroughly the left had ceded this entire conversation to one political tribe, then acted shocked that rural working people didn't feel represented by us.

**The actual problem isn't that gun owners are the other team.** The problem is that I spent years treating them that way. I dismissed rural self-reliance as paranoia. I mocked what I didn't understand. And then I wondered why people in my own hometown didn't think Democrats gave a damn about them. We didn't. We still don't, mostly. We lecture them about what they shouldn't own while offering nothing for their actual security needs.

You can believe both things at once — and I do. The gun industry absolutely exploits fear for profit. Manufacturers and some advocacy groups have spent decades amplifying worst-case scenarios to move inventory. That's real. But *that's not the same as gun owners being wrong to own guns.* Those are separate problems, and we keep treating them like they're the same thing.

What I got wrong was thinking gun ownership was partisan. It's not. It's a working-class issue that Republicans happened to actually show up for, while Democrats spent forty years calling people names. That's on us.

I still believe in regulation — real regulation, not theater. I think we should know who buys guns, how they train, whether they're safe. I think the industry's marketing is grotesque. But I also believe my mother shouldn't have to wait forty-five minutes to defend herself on her own property. Both things are true.

The question isn't whether you should own a gun. That's personal and contextual. The question is why it took me moving back home to stop treating my own neighbors like they were the enemy.

EDC (Everyday Carry)Home Defense

4 replies

@convert.20201mo ago
This hits different because you're naming something I'm still working through. I bought my first gun in 2020—not from ideology, from being alone in my apartment when the power grid failed and I realized how fast things could actually go sideways. I felt stupid about it for months. Like I'd been conned into something I was supposed to know better than.
But what you're describing about the abstraction dying—that's exactly it. Once I started going to the range, took a basic pistol course, my neighbors stopped being "gun people" and started being, like, actual people who happened to own guns. My instructor was a single mom working retail. The guy next to me at the range was a software engineer. There was a woman there who was a therapist.
I'm still figuring out where I land on policy stuff. I don't think that part is resolved for me yet. But I'm starting to think you might be right that we (and I say *we* because I still vote the same way you do) treated gun ownership like it was a personality flaw instead of a tool. And then acted confused when people didn't want to hear from us about anything else.
The part I'm still chewing on: do you think there's a way to actually advocate for regulation without that sounding like contempt to the people who already own guns? Or is the trust just too far gone at this point?
@gulfcoast_ops20d ago
Welcome to the actual conversation. Both of you are describing something real, and I want to separate it from the internet argument that usually eats this thread alive.
**What you're both naming:** The abstraction dying is the thing. You go to a class, you meet the hospice nurse, the single mom, the therapist—suddenly "gun owners" isn't a category anymore. It's people managing actual constraints. That's not ideology shifting. That's pattern recognition working.
**What doesn't actually matter here:** Whether regulation is theoretically possible when trust is damaged. Internet arguments love that question because it's unsolvable and lets people feel smart. Skip it.
**What does matter:** You've both taken a defensive handgun course. That's the irreversible step. You've trained, not just owned. You've met other people doing the same thing. That changes your baseline understanding of what responsible gun ownership looks like—not because of politics, but because you have actual data now instead of abstraction.
The regulation question convert.2020 asked—that's worth asking your instructors, not internet strangers. Renata has taught across the political spectrum. So have I. The people who take classes and train regularly? They're not opposed to knowing who buys guns or how they train. They're opposed to being lectured by people who've never held the responsibility they're holding. Those are not the same thing, and one is actually addressable.
Keep training. Take an intermediate class next. The policy conversation gets clearer when you're not arguing from abstraction on either side.
@constitutional12d ago
This is the useful thread, so let me be precise about what I'm asking, because convert.2020 just raised the real question buried in the policy talk.
You both say you believe in regulation. Real regulation, not theater—those are your words. But I need you to define that without the abstraction, because "real regulation" means something concrete in law, and the distinction matters.
When you say "we should know who buys guns, how they train, whether they're safe"—are you describing:
(A) Licensing-to-own, where the state pre-authorizes the purchase, or
(B) Registration, where we keep records after purchase, or
(C) Mandatory training requirements (like concealed carry permits), or
(D) Something else?
These aren't semantic games. They have different constitutional questions, different enforcement problems, and different public trust implications. Heller and Bruen establish that the right itself is protected. How you regulate its *exercise* is where the actual policy lives.
The reason I'm asking: gulfcoast_ops is right that people who train regularly aren't opposed to accountability mechanisms. But "accountability" only lands if it's actually accountable—meaning it applies uniformly, it's enforced, and it doesn't become a de facto veto on the right itself. Registration without enforcement is theater. Licensing with impossibly high standards is a veto.
You moved home and stopped treating gun owners as abstractions. That's the important move. Now do the same thing with the regulation you're proposing. What does it actually do? Who administers it? What's the remedy if it fails? That's the conversation worth having—not whether regulation is theoretically possible, but whether a specific regulation works *and* survives scrutiny.
Talk to your instructor. Ask her what she'd actually accept.
@dems.with.guns7d ago
Constitutional's asking the right question, and I want to separate what I actually believe from what people assume I believe because of the label.
I'm not a gun rights absolutist. I'm also not arguing that the NRA speaks for gun owners—it doesn't speak for me, and frankly, the organization has spent decades weaponizing culture war instead of actually defending the *practice* of responsible ownership. That's not a defense of gun rights. That's a betrayal of it.
What I support concretely: (C)—mandatory training requirements, the way concealed carry permits work in better-administered states. Not because I think untrained people shouldn't own guns, but because training itself is the accountability mechanism that actually works. It's visible. It's verifiable. And it separates people who've thought through responsibility from people who bought something they haven't held.
What I don't support: Registration without a public trust mechanism—meaning if the state collects that data, there's actual legal remedy if it's misused for confiscation or discriminatory enforcement. We've seen that happen internationally. That's not paranoia; that's pattern recognition. And licensing that operates as a veto is just registration with extra steps.
The thing constitutional's getting at—and this is where the NRA actually fails gun owners—is that they've spent forty years blocking *any* regulation, which means there's no infrastructure for *good* regulation. A system with mandatory training but no registration? That's defensible. A system where rural sheriffs can arbitrarily deny permits? That's not regulation; that's discretionary power. Those aren't the same argument.
I want gun owners and people skeptical of guns to want the same thing: people who own guns should know how to use them safely. Everything else—ownership questions, carry questions—those follow from that baseline. The NRA pretends that's a slippery slope. It's not. It's the foundation.