I became a Republican just in time to vote for Ronald Reagan in my first national election; I went from being a run of the mill Democrat kid to a Reagan Republican.
In a similar sense, I went from being a gun control advocate to being a fire-breathing Second Amendment supporter pretty quickly - you might call me a Bernard Goetz gun owner.
Now, I wasn't that committed to liberalism at that point, and let's be honest, I was pretty young, so the cognitive dissonance wasn't a huge problem for me. I took the switch in intellectual stride.
Making the conversion to being a shooter? That was a little more of a leap. My parents were very anti-gun; I wasn't allowed to have cap pistols or squirt guns as a kid. This was at a time when some polls showed 85% of Americans favored some kind of gun control, a strong plurality favored banning handguns, and there were too few "assault weapons in civilian hands to make them an issue yet.
Times have changed over the past (cough cough) few decades; it can be argued that gun rights are winning the culture war.
Point in favor: people - some, anyway - on the American Left are starting to take their Second Amendment rights seriously:
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.
But the cognitive dissonance is real; some on the left are distinctly uncomfortable with the idea that some of their people have turned coats on the issue. And they're expressing those reservations the way the white progressive left always expresses those feelings (other than club-footed Haka dancing or topless protests by people we'd rather keep their tops on): writing a play.
The show is called Friends with Guns, written by Stephanie Alison Walker.
You think you know your friends, your neighbors, your spouse, but what happens when you suddenly find out they have a garage full of guns? This new dark comedy explores the complicated issue of gun proliferation when two young liberal couples are forced to confront their assumptions about who should own a gun and why. The time of easy answers regarding this issue is long gone. In the wake of current events, we are all forced to reexamine our strongly held beliefs about gun ownership.
And just like when Big Left says they want "a conversation about guns," they really mean a monologue where they talk and we shut up and listen. You can just guess who it is who gets to do the re-examining in this play:
Director Julia Harris explores the themes of gun culture and its effect on relationships in "Friends With Guns," a play making its regional debut at Silver Spring Stage from September 26 to October 12. https://t.co/uhmtEEIKpg
— Source of the Spring (@SourcetheSpring) September 27, 2025
I like to keep an open mind, but I'm gonna guess there are a lot of NPR tote bags and co-op grocery membership cards in the audience, at least of this recent staging::
Guns are a pervasive part of American culture, and their presence—or even a discussion of their presence—can chill friendships and fracture relationships. Such is the topic of “Friends With Guns,” a play opening this weekend at Silver Spring Stage and having its regional debut...
...[Director Julia Harris]: Yes, it’s about fear and also about control. And there’s a related idea, I think, that the more we fear the more we try to control things. But the fear is still there all the time because we can’t control the outside world. Shannon is especially fearful. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the possibility you will be shot if you go to school or are shopping or at church?
As long as they can see normies as cartoonish caricatured "others", it makes it easier to pigeonhole and mock them. At best.
