You&#x27;ve largely got the lay of the land correct.  I&#x27;d add:<p>These two &quot;religions&quot; are irreconcilable; the pro-gun control group has, since at least the &#x27;70s when I started closely following this and being an anti-gun control activist, made it crystal clear that many of them will not be satisfied until they&#x27;ve taken all of our guns (or nearly so, e.g. the over and under shotgun class like Biden, what e.g. the U.K. has devolved to at the same time they&#x27;ve reversed the trend since the 13th Century of decreasing interpersonal violence).  In return, we&#x27;ve made it clear that we know our 20th Century history, if they get very far in this, we&#x27;ll kill them, wholesale and retail.  No common ground possible there.<p>Second, this is part of a larger cultural war.  We need look no further than now President Obama saying in 2008:<p><i>You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing&#x27;s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.<p>And it&#x27;s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren&#x27;t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.</i><p>Third, there have been some major changes in gun owning demographics, purposes and the like, part of what some call Gun Culture 2.0, and it really started becoming a thing post-9&#x2F;11, when the Federal government made it clear we were on our own.  The other part is a rapidly graying society as the Baby Boomers reached middle age and now retirement age.  For whatever reasons, a very large fraction of them are turning to guns for self-protection, e.g. the vast majority of people in my 2008 Missouri CCW class were obviously middle aged or older.<p>There&#x27;s also been some massive changes on the ground: starting in 1987, &quot;shall issue&quot; or better concealed carry regimes have swept the nation, such that they hold in all but 7 states, and cover 72.6% of the population.  Issued licences are now growing by more than a million per year, the numbers are astounding, and on a percentage basis have reached 5-10% of the population in shall issue states.<p>In the same period, &quot;Constitutional Carry&quot;, i.e. no permit required, went from 1 state, Vermont (which simply never restricted it post-Civil War) to 10, with 2 being added in the last month or so, and perhaps more to come this year.  That&#x27;s now 7.2% of the above percentage.  See this with nice graphs here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlygunsandmoney.blogspot.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;every-picture-tells-story-part-v.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlygunsandmoney.blogspot.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;every-picture-t...</a> (although I&#x27;d add that DC, MD, and NJ are <i>de facto</i> no issue states (for a demonstrated serious need, MD <i>may</i> issue for the duration of the threat), even if the law allows it; also, many local units of CA, MA and NY are <i>de facto</i> shall issue or thereabouts).