Which component of US gun control laws or "gun culture" bothers gun control advocates the most?

[Eleanors38]

12. Good question, and a tough one. Controller animosity is a good place to start...

The sweeping nature of moral condemnation and distasteful caricature used to stereotype tens of millions of "others" goes to a fundamental fear on the scale of a racism. The casualness when expressing these hatreds suggests a legitimazation.

Going back to the earlier days of gun-control at the end of the 1960s and for several years thereafter, much of the talk was truly mean-spirited. And that talk wasn't the scrawlings on a bathroom wall, but the considered "opinion" of journalists, daily news cartoonists, politicians, academicians, and other "opinion-makers." This set a tone early-on for legitimizing inflammatory dialog which persists to this day. Said another way, what fan of the racism of Theodor Bilbo would turn down a free-pass to bark anything you want without fear of community retribution?

We come to the present when the older "order" of mass media legitimacy which encouraged this animosity is in collapse. The language persists in cartoons, late-night, and on some blog sites, and here. But the old hope of another massive social change on par with the Civil Rights Era, feminism, GLBTQ rights, even environmental awareness, has been lost. The enemy is truly us, and in massive numbers, but the old ways of behaving still persist.

In a sense, it is these early elitist and well-positioned banners who can best answer the question. They set the template.