Answer this: how do you work on legislation to ensure responsible gun ownership with someone who detests any form of civilian gun ownership and absolutely refuses to learn the intricacies? How do you collaborate with someone who thinks themselves to be above understanding what they're working on? Sensible things HAVE been proposed by people with a deep understanding of guns, but they get spit on because they're something other than another ban on an inconsequential feature or function or type of something.

Edit to add: I cannot count the number of times I've given someone a chance and nearly every time the answer to "are you open to the possibility of your side being wrong about anything at all" is along the lines of me being the one who needs to be schooled by someone with zero firearms experience about why banning some specific things will solve mass shootings. On the other hand, I've taken many anti gun people shooting, and taught them some basics, and that changed a lot about how they viewed what they'd previously been told. Internet scholars will say this invalidates their ability to be objective and so their opinion no longer counts.

The evidence, that is total intolerance to the actual ideas and proposals by gun owners, and pushing for more of the same that didn't work the first few times, shows that legislators actual objectives are total disarmament, not the safety and lives of good people.

Sorry about your family.

What makes you think it's so central to my identity? (Granted I've got way more hobbies than most people, I'm sure it's an innocent assumption.)

We might have different ways of judging people. I learned to judge character long before I ever touched my first gun (as an adult), and do not defer or equate a person's identity to their character.

Yeah people lie, but in the orgs I belong to everyone has the keys and full access to nice facilities, and is treated like an adult - consider that a litmus test, or a baseline level of trust which is exceedingly rare to have someone break. You think fearful people just sign up to be on a "cold" range (unarmed) where someone else is running around with a loaded gun (e.g. USPSA), and submit fully to whoever's running the range that day? Or join the club at the police or military range? There's way more fear at the universities (and I live at one of the biggest right now).

Yeah I'm not in the south, only ever lived in big cities that are as blue as it gets.