For decades, the image of gun ownership in America was white, rural and Republican, but that’s been changing, according to gun clubs, trainers, Second Amendment advocates and academic researchers.
They say more liberals, people of color and LGBTQ folks have been buying guns for years and particularly since Trump’s reelection in 2024. This story was based on more than 30 interviews. David Phillips is on the training team of the Liberal Gun Club, which has chapters in more than 30 states and provides a haven for liberals to train and learn about guns. He says club membership has grown from 2,700 in November to 4,500 today. Requests for training, he says, have quintupled.
“The concern is about the supporters of the right-wing who feel that they have been given permission to run roughshod at least, if not commit outright violence against people they don’t like,” Phillips says.
Alright, I’ll bite, why shouldn’t you be able to mod guns?
I’m not talking about something like converting a semi auto to a machine gun
I’m talking about stuff like choosing a different stock or grip that feels more comfortable.
Or maybe you’d prefer a lighter or heavier trigger pull, or maybe you find that your gun’s not cycling properly with a certain kind of ammo and you’d like to swap out some springs or other internal components to address that?
Or maybe there’s a part that wasn’t deburred properly from the factory that is making your gun jam and it needs a little filing or polishing to make it move properly?
Or maybe you have a shotgun for hunting, maybe you’d like to have just one gun and swap between a rifled barrel to fire slugs for deer and a smoothbore barrel for bird shot?
Maybe you want to add a different optic, a scope more suited to the distances you shoot at, or iron sights with colored dots on them so they’re easier for you to see?
Maybe you’d just like to add a sling?
Yeah those are fine, I think in general I’m thinking of bump stocks or something. Basic maintenance & accessibility are cool with me.
It sounds like you need to think about your word choice better then, because that’s exactly the kind of thing many gun owners have in mind when they talk about modding their guns.
And a lot of our gun laws are already incredibly stupid without people trying to drum up stupid ideas like “you shouldn’t be allowed to modify your guns”
I might be misremembering, but I think even the much maligned bump stock was created as an accessibility device originally. It might be another kind of similar stock that was victimized by the media, but IIRC the bump stock was designed as an aid for veterans who had lost a limb to allow them to use a pistol one-handed.
There’s a lot of stuff like that that has been fear mongered by the media. Like suppressors. Everybody has been told that they make a gun basically silent when what they actually do is reduce the sound of a gun from “permanent hearing damage” to “not permanent hearing loss.”
The bump stock is derpy and just for simulating full auto. You’re thinking of the pistol brace that you strap to your arm - they both were in discussion for bans around the same era, that’s likely where you got them mixed up 🙂
Pistol braces are in a “legal but the ATF doesn’t like that fact” area atm. Tl; dr they made an interpretative rule change out of whole cloth, got slapped in the courts, and have a permanent stay on enforcing their rule change.
To add to that, the whole short barrel rifle/shotgun thing is a mistake anyways. When they were first hammering out the national firearms act in the 1930s they were going to outlaw handguns entirely. To cover their bases they wanted to ensure that no one would simply cut down a rifle or shotgun to make a “pistol” they put in a section outlawing those too. After a lot of lobbying from the gun industry they ditched the legislation on handguns, but more or less forgot to remove the parts about SBRs and SBSs.
That’s the one I was thinking of.