So You Think You Know the Second Amendment? (2012)

From the article, something I had not known: "Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety."

That seems to fit with the limited number of rural individual gun enthusiasts I anecdotally know and grew up with (namely, 1980-90's). That is, these individuals take pride in their involvement with gun safety (via receiving and displaying awards, community recognition, and so forth), using rifles nearly exclusively for hunting purposes.

Gun culture represents a spectrum. In my rural area, church pews seemed predictably empty, come deer hunting season. Our family and friends hunted with rifles. Out-of-season, we stored them, in a semi-secured gun rack, in the basement. We did not own handguns. We did not subscribe to gun enthusiast magazines. That's the extent of gun culture, for me; they were just there and we used them once or twice, per year.