I'm honestly not sure how to do this.

I'm an Eagle Scout who has shot plenty of guns, looking to get a rifle for myself now in MA (for range shooting, not interesting in hunting personally but have no problem with responsible hunting).

The gun laws in MA are... arbitrary. There's a list of approved guns. We're a "may issue" state for gun licenses, not a "will issue" state, which is exactly what it sounds like. When a co-worker first started talking to me about how he went to the range, I became intrigued and started doing my own research.

I now totally get all of the "right wing nut jobs," as I myself so frequently call them and as they so frequently are, when they yell and scream about their 2nd Amendment rights. I'm all for background checks, gun restrictions, etc... but the system needs to make sense & be easy to understand.

I was speaking to a fellow liberal recently who insisted that hunters are clearly mentally unstable, and no one in their right mind would ever kill an animal for sport. There are 13.7 million hunters in the US. We need to have room in our party for those hunters who prioritize science, education, equal rights & decent human conduct, an economic policy that reflects economic realities, and a foreign policy that benefits us all. Besides the fact that hunters inherently sympathize with environmentalists and conservationists!

From the article,

But aren’t guns inherently oppressive, reactionary and patriarchal?

Reading that sentence gave me a major cringe. Just the fact that there is an audience for whom that sentence resonates is amazing to me.

But also, oddly enough, the article doesn't pose any sort of action plan, and just sort of blandly criticizes the left-- it reads in parts like an NRA magazine opinion piece.