The tech forums have always been pretty good resources, and even in GD there are plenty of people I admire, including most of the old hands. swingset, subnet, DK-Prof, Aimless, Miami JBT, and Zhukov to name a few. But it ain't all sunshine and rainbows, and reading GD in the past 2 months wouldn't give anybody a very good impression of "firearm enthusiasts".
Credit where it's due: unlike, say, TheDonald or even r/conservative, it is a free speech zone. I don't recall them banning anybody for expressing a political opinion. If you were left-leaning you would definitely get dogpiled by commenters calling you an idiot or a shill, so you probably wouldn't hang around very long, but that's just what happens when the community is 95+% right wing, and maybe 50+% what you might call far right wing. You would not be censored just for going against the herd.
It's been moderated much more strictly in recent days, including moving most political discussion to a separate, paid-members-only board, but it still takes like 10 clicks around GD to find a post where somebody suggests it might've been good if some Democrats in congress died that day. Subtle and not-so-subtle race replacement conspiracy theory rears its ugly head now and then in GD too. If you're GoDaddy, looking at what happened and what type of rhetoric led to it, I can see why you'd want to distance yourself ASAP. It's not the call I would've made if I ran a DNS registrar, but I'm not going to pretend there's nothing there to justify it.