> My wife's extended family is really into hunting so I ended up taking a gun safety course to get my hunting license. A LOT of gun safety is preached there. [examples]
The gun safety doesn't surprise me at all. But it's a bit unclear to me, are you saying that's to do with it being politically moderate?
I'll see plenty of stories about gun deaths via carelessness (Dad leaves a gun cabinet unlocked, six-year-old shoots his sister by mistake, that kind of thing), and the commentary/agenda around that tends to be "and this is why we need more gun control", and then you get arguments against that from the other side. So perhaps in my mind advocacy for safety was conflated with advocacy against guns, so it was mildly surprising to see that not only is rigorous safety taught, but it's also practiced by owners of firearms.
In other words, perhaps I read too many comment sections on partisan platforms! Pretty much every time I get out into the real world I see that people are never as extreme as their online counterparts.
Glad you got to understand what REAL law-abiding gun owners are like. We are maniacs over safety and responsibility.
Don't let the press demonize such things. The legal ones aren't the ones to worry about.
And everyone I know in Texas who carries in a medium-to-large size city is still doing it concealed. Out of sight, out of mind.