Gun rights advocacy and out-group perception.

“But a lot of these Muslim activists don’t support gun rights!”

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Here's the empathy experiment I think is instructive.

Imagine you're a regular person, one who covers her hair and is thus readily perceived as a Muslim. Imagine no firearms training or experience or inclination; you’ve never really even thought about owning and carrying a gun as if that’s a normal thing for human beings.

Now imagine there are thousands upon thousands of thugs threatening you with every imaginable evil. And now imagine that they're armed to the teeth under the 2nd Amendment, they're represented in the national government (and you're not), they have a pernicious and pervasive media arm that constantly spews out filth demonising you, and the biggest, most powerful voice when it comes to gun rights has become indistinguishable from this lynch mob that despises everything about you and your community.

Then throw on top of that the creeping suspicion that any time somebody who isn't part of this mob exercises their "right," the government can kill them and walk away like nothing happened, and this mass of “rights advocates” will collectively shrug its shoulders too.

OK, I'm a gun rights guy. What am I supposed to do with that? Who am I supposed to blame for the fact that this hypothetical person thinks that, on the whole, this gun thing seems like a lot more of a problem than a solution?

That's too big an ask, and it's OUR fault that it's too big an ask. We've let these various species of nationalists occupy this space, we've let them be the voice of the constitutional right, we've sat idly by while they exercised the hell out of their 2nd Amendment rights and scared the life out of everyone they hate, people who are just trying to live their lives and not engage in gun battles to protect themselves and their children.

Who am I supposed to identify as the threat to liberty again?

I think gun rights have a persuasive narrative for persecuted groups. I think it’s exactly the most threatened communities that have the most to gain and protect through self-defence. I think every home should have a copy of Nicholas Johnson’s “Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms” by the bedside.

But boy, do I understand why people look at the current landscape of gun rights advocacy/exercise and come to the opposite conclusion.

If we as gun rights advocates are so troubled by this phenomenon then let’s do something about it, and stop viewing anyone who supports gun rights, no matter how insidious their motives are, as if they’re our allies. They aren’t. They’re doing more damage to the concept of gun rights than even the most strident anti-gun activists.

I support gun rights as a means of resisting public and private tyranny, I do NOT support gun rights as a means of imposing the dominant social order or intimidating the rights of out-groups.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to articulate that distinction before. Whose fault is that?