I have no problem with people owning guns for hunting. I have no problem with people having non-working guns as a part of a collection (I even have a few rifles from the civil war era from my grandfather in a big ceder chest). I can't understand the necessity of being constantly armed due to fear of eminent attack, as it's something that runs counter to my way of thinking, but I've learned to accept that mostly it's harmless. Most liberals are mainly like this, and many have even backed off gun control more recently. My point about many people on the left is that we don't buy into the "someone is probably going to break into your house and rape you, and you have the right to murder this phantom" way of thinking. We're also less likely to buy into war rhetoric. It's not that we're less naive on average, our naivete just manifests in different ways.
I think the aim of discussion should be mainly about the relationship between modern far-right conservative politics, extremist gun culture, insrectionism (a made up word meaning individuals that live in a constant state of readiness to insurrection), and the willingness to commit attacks against innocent or pseudo-innocent people. It's where those avenues meet that we find our most recent generation of home-grown terrorists, people willing to blow up abortion clinics or shoot up holocaust museums.
I wasn't surprised to find out that James von Brunn, the man indicted in the shooting at the holocaust museum, is a "birther", someone that believes that President Obama's birth certificate is a fake. I was also unsurprised to find out that he has been militantly opposed to the existence of the Federal Reserve since at least the early 1980s. I was not surprised to find out that James von Brunn had very conservative views on illegal immigration, rooted in his own racism.
James Von Brunn: A Profile | TPMMuckraker