I guess the picture painted of the pro-gun folks is often the extreme end - open carry, walk around college campuses with assault rifles to protest their rights - so it was perception-altering to see instruction along the lines of "don't display your gun in the car window" or whatever, and then to look around and realize that most people act that way.

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.