Maybe I can get this thread to drift back toward the original topic...
When I was but a lad, my best friend's dad was a retired US Army Major. He'd fought in WWII and in Korea. He checked electric sockets by putting his finger in the hole. He was a man, proven in battle, and confident in himself.
He raised his son the same confident and self-reliant way, and his kid was my pal.
He and I and our friends played at war with the Japanese, war with the Germans, cowboys and Indians (which was war with the natives). Guns were a vital part of that play.
We all carried pocket knives and we respected what they could do. Of course, that didn't stop us from playing mumbly-peg or getting the occasional cut thumb.
Most of us got BB guns around age 7, and .22s when we turned 12 or 13. We respected what those weapons could do, too.
Depending on the relative "wealth" of the families involved, when we turned 16, we might get a 30-30 or a .30-06, or maybe a shotgun if the men in the family tended to be bird hunters. My folks didn't have that kind of cash, so I depended on guns borrowed from my Uncle Jack when larger calibers were required.
Point is, that's how it went until the '60s when the socialists and commies took advantage of an unpopular war and the "make love not war" movement to make guns singularly unattractive to the up and coming generation.
I'm not sure how I managed to escape that idiocy except that I had been raised by freedom-loving parents who understood the value of defending that freedom from aggressors foreign or domestic.
I ended up volunteering for military service when some of my fellow college students headed off to Canada or joined the Quakers and became conscientious objectors.
By the time I got back to the world, John Kerry had explained to America that our military killed babies and raped women. I and my fellow vets had the joy of being called murderers and having panty-waist sissy-boys (and girls) spit at us. If we owned any guns, we kept it quiet. Looking back, I am embarrassed to say that the commies won that encounter--they made us feel a bit ashamed that we owned firearms. And it was at this time in our lives that we ended up settling down and raising kids--who probably were not introduced to guns because of our manufactured shame.
And that, I think, is where the hatred of firearms started. It was then reinforced and compounded by girly-boy TV stars like Alan Alda who starred in M.A.S.H., which may have been the only show about a war where no guns were fired. It was fueled by lefty Hollywood elitists who always know better than you do what choice you should make--and none of those choices would involve firearms. And it was cemented by the leftists realization that guns represent the power of a free people to determine how much crap they would take from the elitists.
They had to strip away all that power so no one could rebel against their Statists' agenda.
For them, and for us, it was and is a matter of self-preservation.
And that's why they hate guns, gun owners, God, religion, reason, rational thought, freedom, capitalism, and the list goes on...
Of course, this is not a detailed nor complete history of the development of gun hatred in the US of A. I left out the part about leaving God out of everything. After all, you cannot have God-given rights if there is no God, now can you? And I left out the part about the decline in morality and the dissolution of the two-parent household. Candice Bergen's character Murphy Brown having a kid out of wedlock stamped out the final shame in producing a bastard kid...
Well, it's getting late and I need to relinquish the soap box.
Stay steady and strong, my friends. Be vigilant. Keep your weapons close and loaded. Embrace family and friends who embrace freedom. With some luck, we may be able to pass our guns down to our grandkids.
Crusader Rabbit